


corvus, vulpes, lupus

by badacts



Series: genus [1]
Category: All For The Game - Nora Sakavic
Genre: Daemons, His Dark Materials AU, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-05-02
Updated: 2017-05-13
Packaged: 2018-10-26 21:56:06
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 6
Words: 31,834
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10795530
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/badacts/pseuds/badacts
Summary: Sin settles later than most.It’s not until Mary dies that she finally does settle. Neil looks away from the car, dazzled by firelight and the sense memory of her daemon breaking apart, and finds silvery speckled fur with jet-black points and reddish eyes the same colour as Nathaniel Wesninski’s hair. Just like that, he knows she won’t shift again.





	1. vulpes

**Author's Note:**

> [Check out the daemons here at my tumblr.](http://badacts.tumblr.com/post/160002520997/hi-is-there-a-post-you-made-about-everyones)

Sin settles later than most.

Having a distinctive daemon is somehow less obvious than having one that no one ever sees. All kinds of kids have peacocks, grizzly bears and cobras - they shift week-to-week, about as permanent as the wind. If not for his mother, Neil would wear Sin against his skin every day as something tiny. But that would be obvious, so instead her name changes almost as much as her form.

It’s not until Mary dies that she finally does settle. Neil looks away from the car, dazzled by firelight and the sense memory of her daemon breaking apart, and finds silvery speckled fur with jet-black points and reddish eyes the same colour as Nathaniel Wesninski’s hair. Just like that, he knows she won’t shift again.

He wants to run and leave her behind. Instead, the first night they’re alone when he’s finally holed up somewhere safe enough to sleep, he presses his face into her coat and says her name like a prayer.

  _Jacinth_.

“Shh,” she replies, voice rusty and weary as Neil feels. Like she’s remembering Mary’s lessons, _you’re Alex-Stefan-whatever and nothing else_ , with the ferocity that Neil stills feels the echo of blood-deep.

Tomorrow, he’ll be someone else again. So will she. But he can’t resist the little kernel of truth that is her true name in his mouth.

 

* * *

 

Sin laughs sharply when they read about Kevin Day joining the Foxes. _Irony_ , she says, her teeth on show.

She isn’t laughing when Wymack comes for them.

“It’s almost meant to be,” he says, gesturing to her where she’s poised at Neil’s feet. The tension in her body is more obvious than it is in Neil’s, every muscle tight with it. “Need a pen?”

“No,” Neil replies. “I’m not playing for you. You’re wasting your time.”

Wymack taps at the side of his head like he’s not sure his ears are working right. “I misheard you.”

“You signed Kevin.” It sounds like a non sequitur. It’s not – this is a death sentence that the Fox coach is asking him to sign.

“And Kevin’s signing you-”

Neil bolts, leaving him and Hernandez behind in a clatter of metal under the soles of his shoes. There’s no pull from Sin, because she’s right at his heels.

Graduating high school means nothing if he dies within the year. Forget it – he’ll leave tonight, outrunning Kevin and all of his other ghosts.

Except he’s too slow. Halfway through the locker room he realises he isn’t alone, but it’s already too late.

It’s like he hits a brick wall, gasping and suddenly unable to go another step forwards. For a second he doesn’t realise what has happened – then he hears Sin gasp his name.

“Better luck next time,” comes a voice from behind Neil. He can’t look to see who it belongs to, his eyes caught on Sin as she struggles in the jaws of another daemon.

“Let her go,” he says, dropped to one knee and not even sure how he got there. The crawl of pain that feels like teeth in the back of his neck is overwhelming, all-consuming.

“Oh, no, no,” the voice says. “We came all this way for you. It’s no fun if you run off ten minutes into our meeting.”

There’s the sound of feet on the floor, and Wymack and his coyote daemon appear in the doorway with Hernandez behind them. Wymack says, “God damn it, Minyard!”

“We didn’t break them, Coach,” the voice replies. “Effective, no? Not even a bruise.”

“Let go of her,” Neil repeats, finally managing to turn his head away from Sin to the owner of the voice. Andrew Minyard is familiar thanks to Neil’s reading habits, a broad grin across his face and his hands shoved into his pockets.

“Now, Andrew,” Wymack says.

Andrew gestures to his daemon. “What, you can’t ask her?”

She doesn’t look particularly interested in reasonable argument. She probably outweighs Neil, and even with her head low is nearly a metre tall. She’s a spotted hyena, roughed-coated and powerful and slavering around her grip on Sin’s coat.

Smiling still, Andrew says, “Amaranth.” His daemon spits Sin out at last, so she lands in a heap on the floor. A second later, she bolts for Neil – he opens his arms for her, and then she’s in them, clasped close enough that he feels like he could push her inside of his chest.

It’s not the first time she’s been grabbed by another daemon. All of those memories drag at Neil as he holds her spit-damp, quivering body against him.

“Are you okay?” Wymack asks them, as his daemon puts herself between them and Amaranth. Amaranth nips at her tail and laughs at the snap she gets in response, the sound bright and horrendous and all animal against the backdrop of the locker room.

All the articles talk about Andrew and his bright drugged smile – they don’t mention the effect on his daemon. Or maybe the madness is a pre-existing condition.

“I’m fine,” Neil replies. “I’m leaving.”

Except he isn’t. Except, he doesn’t. Instead he leaves campus in the dark, with Sin curled around his neck, the contract weighing down his bag, and Andrew Minyard’s mocking words in his ears.

 

* * *

 

Sin likes the way Neil’s loft catches the light in the afternoon. She curls up like a cat in his blankets while he tries to make his way through a problem set. Distracting, especially when she rolls over onto her back and writhes - to be honest, it’s been a very long time since he’s seen her look so comfortable.

“Does Amaranth talk to you?” Neil asks around the pen in his mouth. Since Neil told Andrew a taste of his truth and got him to agree to let Neil stay, Sin has been fitting in more and more with the monsters’ daemons, a ghost at the edge of their misshapen pack.

Sin pauses, paws in the air, and turns her head to him so she can watch him upside down. “What do you think?”

“I’m not sure she talks at all.” It’s been bothering him - her laugh, her blank eyes that match Andrew’s blown ones, the shape her mouth makes when she shows her teeth. More animal than daemon, except for her waiting silence in the back of Andrew’s car when he’d picked Neil up from the airport pretending to be his brother.

Neil should be afraid of her. He should be afraid of Andrew, too. He isn’t yet, though he might live long enough to regret that.

“There’s your answer then,” Sin replies, rolling back over to sit like a sphinx. “None of them talk to me. Except Esme.”

Esme, Nicky’s marmoset daemon, talks to everyone. Neil frowns. “Not even Onyx?”

“Maybe once Kevin stops hating you so much she might,” Sin says. 

“Don’t hold your breath,” Neil recommends, reluctantly flipping a page of his textbook.

“It’s hard to get close to her anyway, with the twins around,” Sin muses, not quite absently. Neil edges her another glance. She’s referring to Amaranth and Aaron’s Celeste, a perfect pair of hunters, called by the nickname the Foxes would never use on the Minyards themselves. Neil wonders which of the upperclassmen’s daemons she picked that up from.

The presence of the two of them isn’t enough to deter Sin, anyway - she’s Neil persistence and apparent death wish made flesh, the reason Neil understands his mother’s frustration in trying to keep them safe. Before he has a chance to warn her a second time, the bedroom door swings open to admit Matt.

Piper, his ebullient boxer dog daemon, jumps her front feet up on the ladder to Neil’s bed. “Hey. Dinner?”

Sin juts her head over the edge of the bed to look down at her, all faux-aloofness. Neil wonders if he just knows her too well, or whether he’s just as transparent when he looks at Matt.

“What she said,” Matt says, leaning in the doorway. And that’s new to Neil too - daemons speaking for their humans, speaking to humans. His mother’s daemon spoke to him, but that was different.

“I’ve barely done half of this,” Neil replies ruefully.

“It’s the first week,” Matt says, waving him off. “You need to get used to being behind now, because there’s no way you’ll keep up from now on anyway. Besides, one of the girls will tutor you - Renee’s good at maths.”

Neil suppresses a grimace at the idea of being alone with Renee, even for something as innocent as tutoring. He doesn’t trust her, and Sin avoids Tau like the plague.

“C’mon. You can’t learn on an empty stomach,” Matt cajoles him.

It’s an easy decision to make - more maths, versus food and the company of the upperclassmen who he is very tentatively warming too. Neil puts aside his books, waits for Sin to spring down to the floor, and then goes.

 

* * *

 

Eden’s Twilight is not what Neil what imagined when he thought about where they might be going – more leather, for a start. Andrew looks out of place amongst the thrashing crowd and pounding music, steady and most of the way sober, Amaranth silent at his hip.

Neil gets his own drinks. But when the people who brought you here have the bartender in their pocket that apparently doesn’t matter much.

When he goes to stand, Andrew puts him back in his seat so hard pain bolts up his spine. His face meets the table. There’s a familiar barking snarl from the floor.

“Leave her alone,” he grits out. Andrew has to lean closer to hear him, and it makes his laugh devastatingly clear. He isn’t even a little guilty – he’s _amused_ by this.

“You’re so concerned about her,” he says. “If I were you, I would be more concerned about yourself.”

“Sin -” Neil tries, and gets no response. He struggles, but his body feels weirdly detached.

“Don’t worry,” Andrew says. There’s nothing reassuring in his voice. “The others will look after her.”

He lets Neil go then. Neil jerks up and goes to surge after him, then feels the connection between him and Sin draw tight. She’s still, hanging by her scruff from Aaron’s daemon’s mouth.

“Better go with them,” Andrew says in his ear, right before Aaron starts to move. Neil stumbles after them – after Sin – and nearly loses his footing because he can’t feel the floor anymore. Nicky’s arm seals around his shoulders, and Neil can’t throw him off.

There’s a daemon-safe space on gantries overhead of the dance floor, and Neil can feel Sin moving up there like a throbbing heart outside of his body. The teeth at the back of her neck are removed, but then something else grabs her – Nicky’s daemon, with her quick and clever little fingers, Neil would be willing to bet.

Neil himself nearly falls down the stairs, Nicky having to half-catch him. They press into the crowd, the crush of people almost as much of an assault as what is happening to Sin right now.

Nicky stops. Neil says, “I swear that I will kill you,” past the finger Nicky presses to his lips, but can’t go on past Nicky’s mouth. The salt-sweet burn of the drugs he feeds Neil straight off his tongue Neil has to swallow.

“This isn’t a game,” Nicky says while they’re still mouth-to-mouth. “If you want to stay alive, don’t fight us.”

He lets go and is gone just like that. Neil falls without his support, crashing to the floor. Someone yelps – a drink splashes on him. It takes a few people to get him back upright, and he has to use dancers like handholds to stay there.

He only has one thought in his head: he needs to get Sin. He pushes through the crowd searching for the stairs, or for any kind of exit, blinded by the lights and numb across every inch of his skin.

He’s nearly at the edge when a hand grasps the back of his shirt and pushes him into the open air by the wall. There’s a fire exit off to his left – Neil can see the sign like salvation. There’s no way he can get to it, with Andrew Minyard pushing him face first into the wall.

“Why the fuck are you doing this?” Neil asks, or thinks he asks.

“Because you’ve come here, with your binder full of cash and Raven paraphernalia, and I don’t believe a word of the sob stories the others are so willing to ascribe to you to explain your myriad bad and obsessive habits,” Andrew replies. His breath is hot against the back of Neil’s neck and ear. He sounds so, so sober. Neil is less afraid than he is utterly furious.

“So why do you think I’m here?” he asks.

“I think you’re here for Kevin,” Andrew says. “Tell me I’m wrong. And don’t lie to me. You won’t like it if you do.”

“You’re out of your mind,” Neil snaps. “You think I’m working for Riko? Fuck off.”

“Do you think I’ll take your word for it?” Andrew asks, fine-edged. “Think of a good explanation, _Neil_. I’ll only wait so long.”

He leans back, but does not let go of Neil’s shirt, instead using it to drag Neil back into the crowd. Neil has no choice but to go, barely keeping his feet. He spins around when Andrew lets go, trying to catch him himself, but he’s so divorced from his body he nearly falls again instead. By the time he gets his balance back and turns to where Andrew probably left, there’s no sign of him.

Neil tries for the stairs again instead. When he finds them Nicky is waiting for him at the base with another laced kiss that Neil can’t fight off.

“Sin,” he says, unable to help himself. Nicky pats him on the cheek and pushes him back into the crush – it’s the last clear thing Neil remembers.

 

* * *

 

Exy is often a free-for-all scrum amongst the playing teams, but the daemons are carefully divided inside the outer ring, in a caged off area the length of the court on each side. Amaranth fits fairly easily, but it would be a tight fit for a bigger daemon.

Unfortunately, the fact that the Fox daemons are away from their opponents doesn’t mean they’re away from each _other._ Dan’s daemon spends most of his time keeping Onyx and Seth’s badger daemon away from each other.

Amaranth paces back and forth away from the others, but her face stays turned away from the crowd. It’s enough of a ruse because she looks frightening anyway, with her ridged back and massive jaws.

Sin is watching her too from her place by Neil on the bench, sitting like a sphinx with her front paws hanging over the edge. When Neil taps the white tuft on her tail, she turns to him and says, “I bet he can’t make it to half time.”

“You’ve been spending too much time with the others,” Neil replies.

“Does that mean you won’t take it?”

“What do you think?”

“Hmph,” she mutters. “If he says he hates the game, why does he make it worse by trying to play sober?”

“I think he hates the medicine more than Exy,” Neil told her. He has the sudden sense memory of Kevin saying in his ear _don’t waste their time tonight_ as the gathering crowd screamed to see them, and nudges her. “Pay attention.”

Out on the court, the Foxes are fighting. Every time Neil looks at them, he’s sucked in, the jealousy of being stuck out here on the bench warring with pure anxiety over actually having to play. He feels the crush of the crowd’s wild enthusiasm, his heart beating hummingbird-quick with it like his blood is moving faster.

This – this, despite his poor luck and his mother’s decisions and his probable eventual death over it, is what he was born for. This court is where he belongs. It’s only fitting that they carry him out of here in a casket, if it comes to that.

It’s only a matter of time before he gets to go out there. Seth takes a bad hit and has to come off, and Wymack turns to Neil and says, “You’re up, Josten.”

He deposits Sin into the cage, and goes to the door. Allison is taking Seth and helping him to the bench, Abby and her daemon hovering over them, and Dan waves Neil through onto the court.

Overhead, the announcer calls, “Going on for Seth Gordon is freshman number ten Neil Josten.”

“Ready?” Dan asks, holding out her stick to him.

“Ready,” Neil tells her, clacking his racquet into hers and watching her grin at the certainty in his tone.

He was born for this, after all.

 

* * *

 

When Neil and Sin join Andrew and Amaranth on the front porch, Andrew casts Neil half a look before saying, “That apathy doesn’t bode well for your sanity.”

“Staying alive is important to me,” Neil says. After the initial surprise, he’s blank – not uncaring, but it’s not as though he ever actually liked Seth either. “I can’t imagine committing suicide.”

“He didn’t,” Andrew replies. His tone implies that he thinks Neil is very stupid. He gets the door unlocked and walks down the hall in the dark. Neil follows, leaving the door gaping open for the others. “He wanted a way out. A few hours at a time where he doesn’t have to think or feel. His method just happens to be occasionally lethal. I warned him, but no surprises he didn’t listen.”

“Is that why you drink?” Sin asks from the floor. She’s been doing that more and more, since they survived their run-in with Andrew in Columbia – talking to the monsters rather than just their daemons, and to Andrew in particular. Neil wonders if she’s trying to get a rise from him.

If so, she’s successful. Andrew steps uncomfortably close to her, earning a hiss. He says, “I don’t feel. Don’t forget that.”

“So entertaining Kevin’s deal with you is just a way to pass the time?” Neil asks. Somehow he doubts that.

“Seth didn’t kill himself,” Andrew says instead of answering.

“What do you mean?”

“He takes anti-depressants, but he goes off them when he and Allison are together. He says he doesn’t need them then, and she knows he likes to take them with drinks. She would have made sure he wasn’t keeping them with him.”

“I saw her check his pockets,” Neil remembers abruptly.

“So did I,” Andrew replies. “Which begs the question of how he overdosed. I suspect it wasn’t by choice.”

“What?”

“I think Riko might have won this round,” Andrew says, and at Neil’s stunned expression, “Convenient timing, wouldn’t you say? Riko broke Kevin’s hand for being better than him. You don’t think he’s willing to kill someone he doesn’t care about after you tore him down on national television?”

“You’re paranoid,” Neil tells him.

“I’m right. I can’t prove it, but I know I am. So how does it feel to be starting line? There will be big expectations after your little tour de force on Kathy’s show.”

“If you are right, we’ll probably be next,” Neil points out.

“Oh, no. We might be infamous for having predictably bad luck, but not even the Foxes could have two unrelated deaths in a season,” Andrew replies. “Besides, losing two players would take us below the minimum number of players to compete. Riko won’t disqualify us when his uncle wants a face off between him and Kevin on the court.”

“Risking my life is one thing,” Neil says. “They deserve better than me putting them in danger.”

Andrew hooks a finger into Neil’s collar and tugs. “I knew what I was agreeing to when I took Kevin’s side. The others might seem stupid, but they knew the risks just as well. Same as when they signed me, yes? Risk and reward. And that’s the same reason why you aren’t going anywhere.”

_Risk and reward_. It’s a fairly apt way of putting it. Neil nods, and only then does Andrew release his collar. Neil moves to step back, but Andrew clasps his wrist instead and presses skin-warm metal into his palm.

Neil has to raise it to his face to see it – it’s a key, a copy, and it takes Neil a moment to recognise it for what it is. Andrew used it to unlock the front door to the house before.

“Get some sleep. We’ll go home tomorrow and work this all out then,” Andrew says, face utterly impassive in the light, and Neil wonders how obvious it is that the word _home_ sends shockwaves through him.

Andrew moves back to the door, the streetlights turning him into a silhouette as he rattles out a cigarette. He perches on the doorstep, and after a moment he’s joined by a silent black shape that presses into him. It’s Amaranth. She’s so quiet sober and in the dark that Neil had forgotten she was even there.

It’s hard to look away from the two of them shoulder-to-shoulder, watching over their family as they grieve. After a moment Neil turns down the hall and retreats to the lounge, Sin at his heels. He curls up in a recliner, and she jumps into his lap to curl against his chest.

She sniffs into his palm, the damp of her nose tracing the shape of the key. She whispers, “He knows just what to say to you.”

“We’re all the same,” Neil whispers back. Heart to heart with her like this they’re almost one, and it’s easy to admit, “Doesn’t mean we’ll survive the year, anyway. They’re just words.”

“Better to die as Neil than a nobody,” she replies, leaving the key alone to push her muzzle into his shirt. It muffles her voice so it’s almost inaudible. “Home.”

“Yeah,” Neil acknowledges, curling a hand over her back to hold her to him. It rocks through him again. He feels Sin’s heart make the same jump. “Go to sleep.”


	2. corvus

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Warning for nonexplicit references to Drake and slightly more explicit references to Evermore (violence, torture).

Their first away game turns into their first win, and the girls sacrifice themselves to press while Neil showers first. He has Sin there watching his back because there aren’t doors, even though she’s annoying when she natters away about the game while he tries to wash up.

“C’mon,” he says once he’s dressed, leading her out.

“You’d think you’d be more cheerful after a win,” she points out, like Neil is ever cheerful.

“You didn’t just play a full game,” Neil replies. Down the hall there’s still a buzz of noise, which means Renee and Dan are still talking to the reporters. He puts his head out, more so they know he’s out of their way now than to actually check on what they’re doing, and retreats when Renee catches sight of him and smiles.

There’s an office door open in the hall, and Neil slides it open cautiously thinking it’ll be a likely place to hide. Wymack is sitting on the bed with a pack of cigarettes unopened in his hand, his daemon lying over his feet. He nods at the sight of Neil, and Sin takes that as her invitation before Neil can convince himself to go in.

It’s not until he turns to close the door before he notices that Andrew and Amaranth are there too. Andrew is cross-legged in the corner, Amaranth jammed between his back and the wall like she’s cushioning him. There’s a scatter of pills on the floor, and Andrew is holding the bottle of whiskey he won for himself double-handed and a little desperate. He hasn’t even changed out of his gear.

By the looks, he’s consumed almost half the bottle of Johnnie Walker already. It’s frankly impressive that he’s still conscious, never mind watching Neil with a sliver of awareness in his eyes.

“Abby and Allison went to the bus already. You can join them or wait here for the others,” Wymack says.

Neil takes a stool beside the door, dropping his bag to the floor. Sin leaps up onto the one beside him, which is good – he doesn’t entirely trust her to leave the other daemons alone.

He looks to Wymack, and doesn’t reach for her even though he wants to, a little. “Why did you put in the stalls, Coach?”

Wymack shrugs. “Maybe I knew you’d come along eventually.”

Andrew smiles, a little crooked like his medication isn’t quite working yet. “Neil is a walking tragedy.”

“You’re a pretty pathetic sob story yourself,” Wymack returns, earning a laugh. Amaranth opens her eyes then, wriggling until Andrew leans forward to let her stand. She noses her away across the room towards Wymack’s daemon, who watches her impassively. Wymack moves a foot half-heartedly like he means to shoo Amaranth away, and says, “Call her off, brat.”

Andrew clicks his tongue, and Amaranth flicks him a look and laughs. So, situation normal. All over again it’s like Andrew didn’t just save their asses in the last seconds of the game, like he doesn’t always claim to care nothing about the game and then pull something out of the bag like that.

It should be impossible. Like most things concerning the Foxes, apparently it isn’t.

 

* * *

 

Andrew is waiting for them by the fountain in the very centre of the mall, perched cross-legged on the stone wall at the edge of the pool. Amaranth has jumped up to sit beside him and has her front paws in the water like she would like to climb all the way in. Andrew has a hand hooked in her ruff, presumably to restrain her, though his concentration seems to be on the phone in his hands.

Nicky leans closer to look. “God, what is that? Can you even text on that thing?”

“Who is Neil going to text?” Andrew asks, tossing the phone at Neil. He catches it out of instinct, before the words even really start to make sense. Then he freezes.

“Me, obviously,” Nicky says, a blur to Neil’s ears.

He opens his fingers to look at the little flip phone in his palm. It’s tiny, but the sight of it breaks him apart. He’s back standing on a beach, flames in his ears along with the rolling ocean, stained with smoke and grief. He’d thrown the phones into the sea last, and never replaced his – there was no point. He’d buried the bones of the last person he could call deep under the sand.

“Neil,” Sin says, her voice like gravity, and then, “ _Don’t you touch him._ ”

Nicky snatches his hand back, only for Neil to surge forward and try to stuff it into his fingers. Nicky won’t take it, drawing his hands away further, holding them between him like he wants to ward Neil off. It’s tricky with Sin between them.

“Neil,” Nicky says. “We need you to keep it. What if we need to get in touch with you this year?”

“You see, all these people seem to want to kill you,” Andrew says, faux-helpfully. It makes Nicky wince, though he doesn’t dispute it.

“I can’t,” tears out of Neil’s throat, more honesty than he’s allowed himself in a long time. It feels bloody, like he’s shredding himself to say it.

“Okay, alright,” Nicky says. He goes to take Neil’s hand and then rethinks it when he looks to Sin, accepting the phone from his palm instead. “It’s okay. We’ll work it out.”

Neil takes the bags from Nicky’s arm, and before he can ask for the keys Andrew steals them from Nicky’s pocket and holds them out.

He doesn’t let go then Neil takes them. His smile is vicious. “I can see why you stick with lying. Honesty isn’t a good look on you.”

Neil wrenches them away from him. “I’ll keep that in mind.”

 

* * *

 

He doesn’t think that’ll be the last of it. He isn’t wrong about that.

When he comes out of bathroom that night at the court, Kevin is gone and Andrew is waiting for him. Sin is already there, her mouth open like Neil just interrupted her. Neil has a second to wonder what she’s said before he sees his new phone sitting on the bench in front of Neil.

He jerks his eyes away and catches Andrew’s eyes instead. Andrew isn’t smiling – he’s meant to be winding down for bed.

“I don’t need a phone,” Neil tells him.

“Funny,” Andrew replies, gesturing with his head to Sin. “She was just telling me that. I didn’t believe her either.”

He takes his phone from his pocket, putting it by Neil’s. They’re twins, only different in colour. “I distinctly remember saying I would watch your back. Why make it difficult for me?”

“I’ve lived this long because no one could find me,” Neil replies. “Why change now?”

“That’s not why, though,” Andrew asserts. “That’s a different kind of emotion from what you felt today.”

“How would you know? You said you don’t feel anything.”

“I’m observant,” Andrew replies. “Come now. Don’t change the subject. I say ‘that’s not why’, and you give me a real reason.”

“Are we playing the truth game again?”

“Why not,” Andrew says with a shrug. “You go first.”

Neil sits across from Andrew splayed across the bench, mirroring him. He twists his new phone in place but does not pick it up. Sin presses into the small of his back, light but warm. “Parents give phones to their kids so they can keep track of them. Mine weren’t different – they always wanted to be able to get in contact with me, if the worst happened. When the worst did happen, I kept the phone anyway. They might have been dead, but I always hoped that they might call one day and tell me it was okay. That I could come home.

“Except the only person who ever called was someone demanding I return the money. I haven’t had one since. There’s no point when there’s no one to call. So why have one now?”

“I don’t care,” Andrew tells him.

“There must be a better way.”

“It’s the twenty-first century, Neil. We’ve moved past smoke signals and pigeon mail,” Andrew says. He points to his face. “Question. Do I look dead to you?”

He does not look dead. He looks tired, face prematurely lined in a way it isn’t when he’s high, like the smile has carved itself into his skin. There’s no impatience in his eyes, because there’s nothing there at all. After a moment of Neil not answering, he says, “Here.”

He pushes a button on his own phone. There’s a gentle whirring, and then Neil’s phone starts to issue a slow song. The lyrics are low and shake Neil to the core. He stares at it for a long breathless moment.

“Your phone is ringing,” Andrew points out. Sin nudges her weight into his spine harder, until he picks the phone up with clumsy hands and answers it.

Andrew raises his own to his face, and does not look away from Neil as he says, “Your parents are dead, and you aren’t fine. That’s not surprising to you. But you are still alive. And until May, I am the man who will make sure you stay that way. I don’t care how or when you use this phone. But you will keep it.”

He clasps Neil’s chin between his fingers, turning his face so they’re eye-to-eye. “And when you need it, you’ll call me. You won’t run. You’ll consider the promise I made to you, and stay. Do you understand?”

Neil barely manages a nod. When Andrew snaps his own phone closed, Neil mirrors him. Then he puts it into his bag.

 

* * *

 

After the banquet, Neil arrives at the court and Kevin is waiting for him.

Andrew and Amaranth are running the steps high up in the stands, like they didn’t have an insanely late night last night. Neil drops his bag on the bench, and he and Sin go onto the court.

Kevin is sitting on the fox paw in the middle of the court, which makes Sin huff. Onyx is perched on his shoulder, and they’re both looking at Neil and Sin the same way: intent, and afraid. They sit across from them, face to face.

“Tell me you aren’t really him,” Kevin says, voice low. “Tell me you aren’t Nathaniel.”

Neil flinches despite himself. “That doesn’t matter. I’m Neil now.”

“You can’t just pretend to be someone else. Why did you come here?” Kevin demands. There’s dismay in the curve of his mouth, and Neil abruptly can’t stand him.

“You brought me here,” Neil tells him coolly. “You wouldn’t take no for an answer. Remember that?”

“You should have run!”

“I didn’t,” Neil says. “It’s too late for that now.”

“I can’t believe your mother agreed to this!”

“My mother is dead. She died a year ago. I buried her myself.” Kevin opens his mouth, but Neil doesn’t care to hear what he has to say. “I don’t have anything else. That’s why I signed with you. I was desperate, and I gambled everything on you not knowing the truth about my father.”

“How could I not know?”

“I didn’t know the truth about the Moriyamas until Coach told me when I arrived here,” Neil snaps. “My mother never told me why we were running, not really. I thought my father was enough of a reason. I would never have come if I’d known the truth.”

Kevin rubs his hands over his face, and says something under his breath in Japanese. Onyx answers him in kind, the first time she’s ever spoken in Neil’s earshot even if he can’t understand her.

Then Kevin explains. It’s worse than Neil thought, and ends with the fact that his mother snatched him away before the entire awful process of his ‘audition’ could be finished.

It seems like a stupid explanation for eight years of running. On the other hand, it was Neil’s life hanging in the balance. Mary Hatford was many things, but Neil never had any doubt that the most important thing to her was keeping Neil alive.

“I’m going to be sick,” Neil says, and lurches to his feet.

Kevin grabs him to stop him. “Nathaniel -”

“Don’t call him that!” Sin snaps, as Neil wrenches himself free. Kevin rises so fast that Onyx flutters for balance on his shoulder.

“Be silent,” she tells Sin, firm and no-nonsense, no real trace of Kevin’s drama.

“Don’t tell me what to do,” Sin snaps back. It is, ironically, something that Neil has considered saying to Kevin himself several times. He’s too caught up in imagining the life he could have had, branded and owned, to get a single trace of amusement from it.

“I won’t run anymore,” Neil says, his voice stark and strange, almost mechanical. “It was bad enough before. I won’t survive it on my own.”

“You won’t survive here either,” Kevin reminds him. “You are too much of a risk for half a dozen criminal enterprises on the east coast. You think they’ll just leave you be?”

“Andrew told us to stay. He thinks I can use all the media coverage of the Foxes to keep us safe – that they won’t do anything to me if I’m in the spotlight.”

“He’s wrong. He doesn’t know the truth, does he?” Kevin asks, and Neil has to shake his head. “Infamy won’t save you. But the master wants to take you on in the spring semester. As long as you keep your head down, he’ll keep you a secret from the main branch.”

“He can’t keep me safe either,” Neil replies. “And I won’t be a Raven.”

“Then you need to run.”

Neil wants to, desperately. His heart is machine gun fire in his chest. He wants a cigarette. He wants to leave and never come back.

He wants to stay. He says, “No.”

“Then you have no chance at all,” Kevin says.

“A chance at what?” Neil demands. “Dying somewhere else, far enough away that you don’t have to deal with the fallout?”

Kevin looks away. Onyx does not, but the anxious mantling gesture she makes is a complete giveaway of her discomfort.

Neil goes on more quietly, “I should have run back in August. I didn’t. I might not have understood how high the stakes were then, but it’s too late for me now. I don’t want to be Nathaniel Wesninski, and I don’t want to be a Raven. I want us to make it to championships, and then I’ll to the FBI and tell them every scrap of information the Moriyamas are so afraid of me giving away. They can kill Neil Josten after that if they like – it’ll be too late for them. But I want to die a Fox.”

 

* * *

 

In October, Kevin stands on the same court as Riko again, the first time in eighteen months as this time as opponents. When he tells Riko _I’m satisfied_ , Neil starts to wonder whether he, too, is invested in dying as a Fox.

 

* * *

 

On the other hand, it’s not Kevin who is the most likely to die amongst them. And for all Neil must be first on the list, somehow it’s nearly Andrew instead.

_So did Luther not believe you or did he say you were wrong?_

_He said it was a misunderstanding._

 

* * *

 

It’s when Neil realises that Andrew is really going to turn down the chance to get off of the drugs he hates over Kevin that he says, “I’ll watch him.”

Kevin spins around to stare at him. When Andrew shoves him aside, Neil realises how completely he’s surprised the other man – Andrew’s smile is gone.

Then it returns. “You?”

Neil doesn’t reply – he’s more patient than Andrew like this. Andrew steps forwards and shoves Neil so he nearly trips over Sin, bumping into the kitchen cabinets. One of the strangers says something, but Sin’s, “Hey!” drowns them out.

Andrew moves to push Neil again. This time Neil takes him by the arm, pulling him along. It puts them both up against the cabinet, the edge of the bench digging hard into Neil’s spine and the hot weight of Andrew leaning into him. Neil can’t see Amaranth, but he can hear her – she’s making her laugh, which at this point is particularly unfunny.

“Oh, Neil,” Andrew says, and then switches to German. “Is this a joke? It must be. I don’t think you know what you’re saying otherwise.”

“You know I don’t joke,” Neil reminds him in the same language. “You have to go. Give him to me while you’re away.”

“Am I supposed to believe you’ll hold your ground if Riko comes for him. Or for you?” Andrew asks. “It’s so likely I’ll return and you’ll be gone.”

“If we were going to leave, we would have back at the first banquet,” Sin says. She’s up on the bench behind Neil’s shoulder. “I wanted to. He wanted to trust you, more than he wanted to keep running. It’s time to repay that trust.”

“I’m not going anywhere,” Neil says.

“Trust you,” Andrew says, like that’s another possible joke. Amaranth laughs again, a pure reflection of Andrew’s amusement, haunting and overly loud in the small space. “Do you really think I’m foolish enough to trust someone who lies easier than he breathes?”

“Then don’t trust that man,” Neil says. “Trust me instead.”

“And who might you be?”

“My name is Abram,” Neil says. “It’s my middle name – I’m named for my father, but my mother always used that name as a way to shelter me from his line of work.”

“An admirable aim, I’m sure,” Andrew drawls. He’s waiting for something else, but for a long moment Neil doesn’t know what to give him.

Then it occurs to him. Taking Andrew’s hand by the wrist, he drags it under the hem of his shirt, ignoring the sharp indrawn breath from Sin at his back. It puts Andrew’s palm right over some of the worst scarring on his belly, raised and unmistakeable.

“Nothing Riko says or does will chase me away. I won’t leave him behind. We’ll still be here when you get back,” Neil says, hyperaware of the pressure of Andrew’s palm as he breathes to speak.

“If I really had read your file, I’d be awfully disappointed as to its accuracy,” Andrew says, like any file on people like them are going to be truly accurate. “A childhood on the run doesn’t account for marks like these.”

“I’m sure you’re not surprised I didn’t tell you a few details of my story,” Neil says. “If we live through this year, you can ask me later. I think it’s probably your turn in the game.”

Andrew extracts his hand from Neil’s grip and steps back into Amaranth’s side. She looks up and Neil unintentionally meets her eyes – they’re very dark, and aware enough he’s surprised for a split second before she grins at him.

After a second more of surveying Neil himself, Andrew turns back to Kevin with a laugh. “I suppose it’ll have to do.”

 

* * *

 

It’s not surprising that Riko comes after them at the Christmas banquet. Neil steps forwards, putting himself in front of Kevin and Onyx, making Riko smile with a sick curve of hunger.

“Take that look off of your face before I do it with a blade,” Riko says. It’s then Neil realises that he’s smiling to match him, the same kind of grin.

“I’m the Butcher’s son. You think that I’m afraid of you with a knife?” he asks.

“Hm,” Riko says, his expression unchanged. “Kevin, you told the master that you would sort out this one’s issues with authority. I’m disappointed to see that that was a lie, too.”

“He tried his best,” Neil says, faux-consoling.

Riko lifts his hand towards Neil’s face, but Sin moves her head then, all bared teeth and tongue. He’s forced to draw his fingers back like he thinks she might actually dare to bite him. That makes the smile slip. “Be quiet, Nathaniel. Your insolence has already cost your team twice over – surely you don’t want a third instance.”

Neil wants to snarl like Sin. Instead he holds up a hand between them, one that doesn’t quake. “I’m shaking.”

“Oh, you should be.” Riko’s daemon is curling at his feet, her massive body whispering on the floor and itself. It’s another kind of threat, the same as the Ravens’ uniform black and Riko’s smile. “I’m from the family your father is frightened of, remember? However scared you are of him, consider doubling that.”

“It’s barely your family, though, is it?” Sin says, because Riko is close enough and because she wants to. “You’re allowed to have the name, but you’re definitely the second son.”

Riko’s expression shifts from angry but amused to total black fury. He grabs Neil’s wrist where it’s still raised between them, twisting it to the point of strain. It throbs, and Sin moves again, her open maw a fraction of an inch from Riko’s own wrist.

“Do you think she won’t?” Neil says. He manages to keep the shake from his voice, though he isn’t sure how. “Fox teeth are sharp. I doubt you’ll play so well with a mangled arm.”

“I’ll break her skull,” Riko says, “A dog who savages its master is put down. That’s the way of the world.”

“You’re delusional if you think you can kill us in front of all these people,” Neil reminds him. Internally, he’s wondering just how delusional Riko really is.

“I do what I like,” Riko replies. “That’s why you’re going to come to Evermore for Christmas. No, no, don’t try to argue – I promise I have a good reason for you, if your continued life isn’t enough.”

He smiles. Neil feels his stomach drop. “Your goalkeeper. I heard they locked him up, is that right? Something about his brother…”

He lets go of Neil’s arm at last. Sin uses her freed mouth to snarl, “Shut up.”

Riko ignores her. “Drake was interesting, yes?”

Neil remembers the bulk of him, and the golden rain of his daemon when she shattered apart. The bloody wreck of Andrew’s body, and Amaranth unmoving on her side.

“Oakland lawyers are easy to buy,” Riko continues. “And so are the staff at Easthaven, it turns out. So if I were you, I would agree. Jean has your ticket – the plane leaves tomorrow morning. Don’t miss it.”

Neil’s quick. He hits Riko once in the eye, once in the mouth, sending him two steps backwards. Then Sin, who leaped from his shoulder the second he moved, sinks her teeth into the base of the skull of Riko’s daemon, making her thrash her massive body. Sin hangs on valiantly, but she’s small – she gets thrown, crashing onto the floor, trailing gold blood from her jaws.

Wymack’s daemon catches her before she can throw herself back into the fight, scruffing her. At the same time, hands drag Neil back from Riko and his still-wild daemon, her jaws gaping as she strikes in warning at Neil’s feet.

“You can’t put a collar on me,” Neil says, watching Riko wipe the blood of his face. He remembers Andrew saying the same thing, and he hasn’t understood the truth of it until this moment.

“You just cost him something he didn’t want to lose,” Riko replies. His bright red grin makes Neil want to be sick – it makes him want to break it into pieces with his fists.

He smiles back instead, frozen to the core. “I understand.”

 

* * *

 

Jean is the one waiting for Neil at the airport. He’s impossible to miss, clad in black and still-faced, taller than most everyone else around him. Next to his monochromatic figure, his daemon is a perfect partner – she’s a snow leopard, silvery-coated with large moonlike eyes.

She is very beautiful. Unfortunately all Neil can think as he approaches the pair of them is the frequency of large daemons amongst child abuse survivors, especially when she stares straight through him.

Jean’s gaze is piercing in comparison. He says, “You shouldn’t have come here.”

“Thanks for the advice,” Sin says, eyeing Jean’s daemon. Neil presses a hand to her tail where it’s curled over his chest and says, “Let’s go.”

The ride from the airport is silent. Neil half-distracts himself by thinking about the snow leopard daemon lying like a sphinx on the back seat of the car. She’s big, and powerful with her massive paws and heavy jaws – a predator like Andrew’s Amaranth. She moves like a smaller animal, though, curled in. Neil wonders how aggressive the other Raven daemons are, and wonders if she has a streak of it in her like Riko’s python.

Evermore is a monolith, painted in black. The cars in the lot are all identical, and Sin says to Neil, “I knew they were a cult.”

Jean lets Neil go down the stairs first. It’s dark, black to match the exterior, especially when the door to the outside swings closed and shuts out all the remaining natural light. It’s password-encoded and low-ceilinged – a prison, Neil thinks, and does not shudder.

“Welcome to the Nest,” Jean says.

 

* * *

 

It’s one hell of a welcome.

Neil, unable to really see straight after his run-in with Tetsuji Moriyama’s cane, is half-hoisted onto the Ravens’ court by Jean. He’s wearing the gear Jean shoved him into, including the jersey branded ‘4’. Sin is deposited into the guard box by Jean’s daemon just the same way as Jean does to Neil himself.

They make him play as a backliner. There’s no show of sympathy from the Ravens. Neil is abysmal, both because of the unfamiliar position and the injuries he’s already carrying, and no one hesitates in adding to the bruises.

Then Jean and Neil have to clean up the court. By the time they get to shower, Neil has to kneel on the tiles because his legs refuse to hold him. Sin is just out of reach of the water – he can’t bear her to be too far from him right now.

“You should have run,” Jean says. He sounds exhausted.

Neil spits, and then examines it for blood. “You think I don’t know what pain is like?”

“Not like this,” Jean replies. Neil is too tired to roll his eyes, but Sin says, “Pain is pain,” her voice small in the big room. Jean looks at her for a long moment and then away again.

They dress and then eat, Neil mechanically chewing without any ability to taste but knowing he’ll need the energy. He keeps Sin in his lap, using her warmth to attempt to ease the aching in his thighs. Once they’ve finished, Jean leads them back to Black Hall.

Jean locks the door to their bedroom behind himself. It’s only then that Neil realises that Riko is inside waiting for them. He walks across the room towards his bed with Sin like it doesn’t even matter, like they’re alone, knowing there’s no point in trying to fight.

He came here, and he never had any illusions about throwing himself on Riko’s mercy. There’s no point when you know there will be none.

Riko stands from the other bed, and he’s smiling again – it’s hungry. There’s a knife in his hand that an older part of Neil’s brain categorises instantly as a switchblade.

“Stay away from us,” Neil says. Sin is poised at Neil’s feet like she means to spring, her head hanging low between her shoulders and her mouth gaping a little to show her razor canines.

“And I thought you were not afraid of me with a knife,” Riko says. “Was that a lie?”

They’re practically of a height when they stand toe-to-toe. Sin’s body presses to Neil’s ankles, her back spiked with loathing. It’s the only distraction Neil gets from the sudden presence of the knife tip at his mouth. He does not flinch. He isn’t sure how.

“I’m going to enjoy hurting you,” Riko says, conversationally. While Neil stares at his face, he’s watching the point of the blade travel along the seam of Neil’s mouth.

It cuts into his lower lip when he opens his mouth so he tastes blood when he says, “I always knew you had daddy issues, but I didn’t realise you were quite this fucked up.”

Riko pauses like he can’t believe Neil just said that. He should probably know better.

Then he says, “Katashi.”

Neil doesn’t even hear her coming.

There’s a shriek, and he’s on his knees at the foot of the bed. There’s – there’s teeth in him, and it takes him a long moment to realise they’re in Sin. Riko’s daemon has her in her grip, fangs hooked into her haunch. Then she starts to coil herself, winding back under the bed where she’d been lying.

“She won’t kill her,” Riko says, watching this happen with clinical interest. “Not unless I tell her to.”

Neil’s hand hits the floor. He’s paralysed, frozen in fear and pain. From his position on the ground, he can clearly see Jean’s daemon. Her eyes are concrete. Now he understands.

“Secure him,” Riko says. Hands grab Neil, forcing him onto the bed. Cold metal bites into place at his wrists – Neil knows without looking that he’s been cuffed. A body at his legs hold him flat so he can’t struggle – Jean, of course.

The mattress compresses at his side as someone sits next to him. His ribs are being crushed, but that might be Sin’s. The blade that just barely bites through his shirt is definitely piercing his own skin.

Riko says, “Good. Now we can begin.”

 

* * *

 

He wakes up on Wymack’s couch, and immediately reaches for Sin.

He swears his heart stops when she isn’t in arm’s reach. He says, so rough it scrapes him raw on the way out, “Sin -”

“Neil,” she replies, her voice cracking back. When he looks to her, she’s curled into the dusty fur of Wymack’s daemon, though she struggling for him. She manages to get herself upright faster than he does, and climbs onto him. He’s too sore for it, really, but he can’t help himself.

“Easy,” Wymack says. He’s sitting on the coffee table like he’s been watching over Neil. Neil suddenly remembers calling him, him saying _wait right there. I’m coming for you._ “You’re both alright.”

“I’m sorry,” Neil says, trying to ease his momentary panic back off of his face.

“Don’t give me that shit,” Wymack replies. “Explain. Starting with why you look like someone tried to break every part of you, and ending with why you also look nothing like yourself.”

Neil touches a hand to his face, and then remembers – his hair. Sin says, “Neil,” but before she can get anything else out he’s dumped her onto the couch and bolted for the bathroom.

She has to follow him because the bond between them pulls ruthlessly tight. The man in the mirror when he flicks the light switch is a nightmare. Neil’s knees go, and he has the scrabble agonisingly with aching arms and fingers at the sink to keep himself from ending up flat on the floor.

“Breathe,” Wymack says, at the same time as Sin presses into his back. She’s shaking too, tail to muzzle, and he wants to hold onto her but he can barely keep a hold of himself. He draws in a breath that rocks through him, that he feels in every rib.

“Neil, tell me what’s going on,” Wymack demands, when it becomes clear that Neil isn’t going to do anything besides stare at his reflection and try to make sense of what he’s seeing.

“I think I’m bleeding,” Neil says.

“Where?”

“Stitches,” Neil says, though he has no idea how many stitches he actually has. He reaches for his coat buttons, but Wymack pushes him away and does it himself. Neil focuses on getting his gloves off with his teeth, flinching at a bite of pain on his cheek. Wymack reaches for his face and, when Neil doesn’t throw himself backwards to get away, peels off a dressing that Neil didn’t even know was there.

He freezes. “What the fuck?”

Neil touches his face, but there’s nothing there to feel. He turns back to his reflection – and turns to stone.

For a second. Sin darts aside the second before Neil moves, but she’s the only one expecting it, but she’s yelping his name even so. Neil climbs to his feet so fast he nearly knocks Wymack onto his ass – and if he wasn’t bleeding before, he definitely is now – and goes to the kitchen. Particularly the knife block that lives on the counter top.

“Al!” Wymack barks, and there’s another yelp as Sin is grabbed. Before Neil can actually carve the ‘4’ tattooed on his face into bloody ruins, Wymack does the same to him. The knife goes skittering across the floor, and Wymack puts him down after it with his arms locked to his sides in a bear hug of a body hold.

Neil fights him. Sin is doing the same, wild with it, wild with the need to get to Neil again, and Neil isn’t sure whether he’d go for her or the knife first if he was free.

“Hey,” Wymack says. “Easy. You’re all right. She’s all right.”

“Neil,” Sin is bawling, and Wymack turns to his daemon, who has her caught up in his jaws. It’s too – it’s too familiar. Neil starts to fight harder, even knowing he can’t get away and that he’s hurting himself more in the process.

“Bring her here,” he says, and when his daemon deposits Sin gently onto the floor, she huddles into Neil’s knees where Wymack can’t touch her. With her belly scraping the floor and her ears pressed flat, she looks as awful as Neil feels.

“Help us,” Neil says. His jaw is clenched so hard he’s going blind with it.

“Let me,” Wymack retorts. Neil closes his eyes, figuring he doesn’t have a choice, and gives himself over the scant comfort of being just barely held together.


	3. pandion

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Extra chapter because this fic is long af now lmao.

Andrew is waiting for Neil in the stairwell, Amaranth a silent shadow at his side. They’re mirrors of one another – her still for the first time Neil can remember, Andrew’s propped pose for once not put on.

Andrew has always been a deft hand at pretending to be sober while flirting with the crash of withdrawal, but Amaranth is no actress. This is unmistakeably something else, beyond the dull cast of Andrew’s face.

Neil hands over the weight of the bands in his palm to Andrew, feeling the loss like something heavier than cloth and two evenly balanced knives. It’s something like relief - Neil remembers the strength in Andrew just barely against him in the lee of the driver’s door just before, close enough for his breath to rustle Sin’s ruff. Taking up Neil’s weight all over again.

Amaranth leads them up the stairwell, but makes way for Andrew to rattle the door open to the roof. She hangs back when Andrew steps to the edge and looks out across the campus, sitting on her haunches.

Sin stirs against his shoulder. Her voice is all breath at his ear when she says, “Put me down.”

It’s for Neil’s benefit, not her own. She’s not walking wounded like he is, but her jumping from her position about his neck would hurt him further. It’s also the first time she’s spoken since she went hoarse on Neil’s name on Wymack’s kitchen floor.

He lets her down, feeling the pain of it in his back and shoulders. It’s also one of the few times they haven’t been touching since he came back from Evermore, and he has to stay close to her to stop the sick drag of her absence adding to every other ache in him.

Amaranth moves as they get closer – Neil pauses back a step, curious as to what Sin is doing but not wary enough to stop her. He watches from there the flicker of the hyena’s ears, the slow turn of her head. She’s not an actress, or she’s not quite like Andrew now either. Her eyes aren’t all the way dead as she watches Sin.

Neil waits for her to snarl. She doesn’t. She bows her head towards Sin, gets nose to nose with her like they’re exchanging breath, and there’s a brief brush of contact that Neil feels like shockwave-heat washing across his face. It leaves his skin prickling even when it ends.

At some point, Andrew has turned to watch the daemons too. Stance square and eyes not blown for the first time in months, he says to Neil, “Care to explain?”

“Not particularly,” Neil replies. He’s black and blue and inked under the thin protective shell of a bandage, and he can’t bear Sin to be more than an arms-length away from him. He figures it all speaks for itself, other than the perpetrator, and Andrew has never been interested in that kind of detail. To him the _what_ has always outweighed the _who_.

Andrew isn’t looking at the marks on Neil anyway – he’s looking at his eyes, which are the bright silver blue of glacial ice. “Did I break my promise, or were you keeping yours?”

Neil says, “Neither.”

“I gave you a truth on credit in November,” Andrew reminds him. “Do not lie to me.”

“I’m not lying,” Neil replies. “I spent the winter break in Evermore.”

Andrew moves – Neil feels Sin collide with his ankles in a full-body flinch before his brain even recognises that Andrew is coming towards them. She’s not snarling, not the same creature that left bite marks on Jean’s forearms, but that doesn’t mean she doesn’t earn Andrew’s attention. Or, for that matter, Amaranth’s.

Neil knows Andrew’s intention anyway. Curving his nails under the bandage on his cheek is enough of a distraction to the pair of eyes trained of Sin, and gives her the opportunity to curl her tail around his ankle like comfort. Neil turns his chin, gives Andrew the full effect of the number on his cheek.

“That does not look like the face of someone who claims to hate Riko Moriyama,” Andrew says.

“It wasn’t my choice,” Neil says, turning back to meet Andrew’s gaze head on as he pats the bandage back in place.

“You chose to go into the Raven’s Nest. Did you forget you were supposed to stay with Kevin?”

“I promised to keep him safe,” Neil reminds Andrew, as though it’s necessary. “I never promised to shadow him every second like you. That doesn’t mean I broke our deal.”

“You would favour the spirit of the law over the word of it,” Andrew says. “But you said this had nothing to do with Kevin. Why go there and throw yourself on Riko’s non-existent mercy?”

Neil swallows. Andrew’s expression doesn’t permit lying. “Riko said if I didn’t, Doctor Proust would-”

This time, Sin doesn’t get a chance to wince before Andrew’s hand claps over Neil’s mouth. It’s a confirmation that sends rage burning through Neil all over again.

“Kevin is the one who needed your protection, for all the good it did him,” Andrew says, his palm humid with Neil’s too-quick reflected breath. “Do not make the mistake of thinking that I will ever need it.”

“We had to try,” Sin says in place of Neil, from between their feet. She’s crowded against Neil’s ankles to avoid Andrew touching her. “Do you really think we could face you again if we’d done nothing?”

Andrew’s hand drops from Neil’s face and he steps back. Behind him, Amaranth is standing now, her head dropped low between her shoulders. There’s no recognisable intent, but it still looks like a casual threat in the same way as Andrew’s curved fingers do even back at his sides.

“That sounds like your problem, not mine. Don’t expect our gratitude,” he says, still bored. Neil thinks it’s the first time he’s ever heard Andrew use the word _our_ , to speak like Amaranth is a being and not his slavering shadow. He wonders if it’s a slip or utterly deliberate.

“I said that I would keep you alive this year. You make my job more difficult when you actively seek your own death,” he continues, taking another step back that puts Amaranth directly at his heels. “The next time someone offers to help you into your grave, let me deal with it. Do you understand me?”

“I won’t,” Neil replies. “Not if it means losing you.”

Andrew’s gaze flickers away, his hand going to his pocket with muscle-memory that looks more at home on him on the court than here, where he stumbles. Neil guesses they don’t let you smoke in a rehab facility.

He pulls his own pack out of his pocket and tosses it over, watching as Andrew takes one and lights it with the lighter from the pack before throwing the it back. Then, around a breath of smoke, Andrew says, “I hate you.”

“You were meant to be a side effect of the drugs,” says a voice that Neil doesn’t recognise, low and lilting and a little rough like a smoker’s. He almost looks over his shoulder before he realises the speaker is right there – it’s Amaranth.

Daemons don’t speak to other people, or only rarely. Sin is unusual, rare in her abrasiveness and her unwillingness to be silent. To hear Amaranth speak is staggering in a way that even seeing them sober isn’t. Knowing that the last time she was here in the Tower she couldn’t talk at all is even more so.

“I’m not a hallucination,” Neil says, dumbstruck.

“You are a pipedream,” Andrew says, his attention back to the view. It’s only the slight tilt of his head that indicates his consideration of his own daemon. Perhaps she surprised him as well. “Go away and leave us alone.”

  

* * *

 

Matt’s mistake is looking – Andrew doesn’t pause before hitting him. It shouldn’t be possible, but the blow knocks Matt to the floor. Then there’s a shriek as Amaranth bounds through the door and bowls Piper over, coming out on top with Piper’s throat cradled in her jaws.

Dan and Lorimer move fast, but Neil and Sin are faster. He inserts his body between Andrew and Matt, using his weight to press Andrew back. He expects resistance, but Andrew goes with him, gaze flickering flatly to Neil’s face and away. On the floor, Sin is whispering to Amaranth. After a moment she loosens her grip on Piper’s neck, but she doesn’t shift her weight.

“Enough,” Neil says. “Matt didn’t do anything.”

“I’ve warned him what would happen if he laid a hand on Kevin more than once. If he is stupid enough to do it again, I will not be as friendly,” Andrew replies carelessly.

“You can’t be threatening him,” Dan snaps. “If it weren’t for him, Aaron would still be sitting in jail right now.”

“Doesn’t matter,” Aaron drawls. He hasn’t moved from his chair, Celeste lying like a sphinx against his shins.

“That was a favour to Aaron, not Andrew,” Nicky chimes in. “You can’t count it as a favour for both just because they’re brothers.”

Amaranth finally lifts herself off of Piper and then saunters back to Andrew’s side. The mass of her passes within inches of Neil’s hip, radiating heat. Sin is at her heels, close enough to touch. After a second Piper climbs to her feet, shaking herself off.

“Nice to see you too, monster,” Matt says dryly as he pushes himself upright. His nose is bleeding down his jaw, but he looks more annoyed than concerned as he drops a hand to Piper’s spine. “Good to know you’re still fuck-all crazy.”

“It wasn’t the drugs that made him crazy,” Aaron says.

“Hello, Andrew,” Renee says. She has Tau in her lap, his head curved into her hand, impossibly elegant. Andrew doesn’t reply, but he sends them an impassive look that seems to please Renee, by her smile. Whatever she sees in Andrew’s face makes her nod, the interaction so quick Neil might have imagined it before Andrew turns his attention back.

Wymack comes in then, the door banging open. He looks to Matt, and then to the cluster of Neil and Andrew and their two daemons across the room.

“Didn’t we just talk about not killing your own teammates?” he enquires, eyebrow raised. Andrew ignores him entirely. Wymack turns his gaze to the others, finding them missing a face. “Where is Allison?”

“She went to look at the banners,” Neil answers him.

“She’ll come back when she’s finished crying,” Nicky adds.

“She won’t be crying.” Neil knows Allison. It’s more likely she’ll come back spitting and even more resolved.

“Five bucks says she is.” Nicky grins.

Neil should really let it go. The Foxes will bet on anything, and trauma is never excluded from that. Unfortunately he’s so rubbed raw he can’t. He spits, “Don’t you dare bet on someone’s grief.”

“Oh, hey,” Nicky says, raising his hands. Esme clutches at his upper arm like she always does when Nicky gets called out. “No harm intended. I was just trying to lighten the mood.”

“Go lighten your chair and check on her,” Wymack says. “We’ve got too much to go over today, and she’ll be angry if I start without her. Yes, you, Hemmick. I don’t want Neil moving more than he needs to.”

“I can walk,” Neil says.

“Proud of you. Didn’t ask,” Wymack replies drily, as Nicky leaves the room.

There’s a sharp bite in the tender skin at the base of Neil’s throat – Andrew has a nail set in the hollow of his collarbone. When Neil’s attention snaps to him, he says, “Sit down and be still.”

Neil smacks his hand aside, scowling. By his feet, Sin squalls as Amaranth tugs her tail, lunging to bite the bigger daemon with her lips drawn back. Amaranth puts a broad paw against her head to push her aside, avoiding Sin’s needle-sharp teeth. They’re stopped from more bickering by Andrew moving to the couch: Amaranth goes with him to lie over his feet.

Neil takes the empty spot on the couch beside him, Sin leaping lightly into his lap. She’s fizzing with irritation, burying her nose under her tail. Neil’s body complains – he shouldn’t really have moved so fast to get in Andrew’s way, but the nod of gratitude Matt gives him makes it seem worth it.

Neil glances back to Andrew, and finds him toying with a small knife down at the level of his lap. Sin turns to look and flinches violently away – it’s too close, too familiar, and Neil can’t blame her even through the bite of pain he feels at moving to steady her on his bruised thighs with his aching arms.

Andrew pauses. The others are looking, though they’re still talking in an attempt at veiling the fact they are. When Andrew looks to Sin and then to Neil’s face his gaze is still and, underneath that, evaluating.

Neil struggles for the words he wants, feeling the tight drum of Sin’s heart against his fingers. “I…I’ve never understood a taste for knives.”

He doesn’t mean Riko, but he knows the assumption Andrew will make. He’s more surprised by the ferocity of the reaction it earns him – stillness from Andrew, absolute, which turns to a glance towards Renee. She is listening, her face gone very blank, and she’s looking at Neil. Tau’s black eyes are also on him.

Renee’s smile is gone – she looks, for a moment, like Andrew. It makes Neil tense, Sin bunching in his arms like she’s ready to spring into movement. But the two of them stay frozen for the endless moment until Renee’s eyes move to meet Andrew’s.

No one else has any idea what is going on, by the looks on their faces. Renee’s expression is perfect understanding as she tilts her chin to Andrew again. Andrew hums lightly, the knife disappearing into his clothes. Amaranth huffs down on the floor, seemingly unmoved by the way the air has been sucked out of the room around them.

“He’ll lose it when one is turned on him,” Andrew replies plainly. He doesn’t look at Neil again, but Neil knows he notices when Sin relaxes again. Neil spreads a hand over her flank, letting the both of them find comfort in it.

Across the room, Tau’s neck sways as he turns his head away. Renee’s expression shifts, the light leaking back into it just before she continues what she was saying like she never paused. Dan looks puzzled, but whatever her questions are, she doesn’t ask.

 

* * *

 

Neil trades his scars for his teammates’ uninjured ankles, and that seems like a fair trade until Andrew shows up in his room with a bag of clothes and Amaranth trailing behind him. She turns away to sniff around the living room, but Andrew follows Neil through to the bedroom in the same insouciant way as Sin.

He gestures to Neil’s shirt, and after a moment of hesitation Neil moves to take it off. He struggles with it, still too stiff to move with ease, and Andrew’s lack of patience means he unhooks it himself rather than wait for Neil to win the fight.

Andrew tosses it aside, but doesn’t look away from Neil’s skin to see it land. There’s plenty for him to look at – the raw and nasty scabbing around his wrists, the burn scar on his shoulder, the bullet scar, and the unmistakeable mark of a blade curving up over his collarbone. Neil looks to Andrew’s expression and finds it smooth and unbothered.

“You were shot,” he observes.

“I did tell you people were after me.”

“This wasn’t done by someone after you.” Andrew’s hand spans the iron scar, unmistakeable. “Household appliances aren’t effective weapons.”

“My father,” Neil provides. “I didn’t sit still enough when the cops were doing one of their tours of his house and business.”

Andrew traces the scar on his collarbone, and then drops lower to the slashes on his belly. “Renee says you refused our knives. It seems foolish for a man like you to go unarmed.”

“Didn’t know you cared,” Sin cuts in from where she’s sprung up onto the dresser. They both ignore her.

“I’m not unarmed,” Neil points out. “You promised to watch my back. Remember?”

He knows Andrew hasn’t forgotten. There’s a long moment in which Andrew says nothing, and Neil decides to push. “You aren’t a sociopath, are you.”

“I never claimed to be,” Andrew replies. He sounds bored.

“Everyone else says that you are. Why not correct them?”

The look he gets in response is very, very vaguely scathing. “I’m sure they would have believed me, of course. Like all madmen who claim to be sane.”

Neil blinks. He hadn’t considered that. “You don’t talk to people who don’t believe you.” _He said it was a misunderstanding._

Andrew points at him like an unsmiling game show host, as if to say,  _you've got it_. “If you have any other questions, you can direct them to my lawyer.”

Then he leaves, closing the door behind him.

 

* * *

 

The cousins are welcomed back to Eden’s Twilight like heroes, and Neil and Sin slide around them unnoticed. It’s not until Neil goes up to the bar alone in an attempt to escape the awkward silence at their table that he finally gets someone’s full focus on him.

Roland is friendly enough, but Neil’s not too fond of people with snake daemons these days. His is a slim emerald green snake that curls in rings up his arm like ornate jewellery, her scales flashing in the light. She flickers her tongue at Neil when he leans up against the bar to watch Roland mix the next round, Sin draped around his neck like usual.

“Andrew must have finally given in,” Roland says, voice lightly conversational. “Looks pretty bad.”

Neil manages to not reach to his face at the last moment. Roland is looking at his wrists where the sleeves have ridden up, exposing the scabbed and half-healed skin there. He yanks his cuffs back down, but it’s too late, and – Roland is laughing.

It’s a strange reaction. Neil stares up at him and gets a smile in response. “I wondered if being clean would cure his hands-off rule, but it looks like sobriety might have worsened the issue. They make padded cuffs, though, you know. Lots of discreet online stores sell ‘em. Try Google.”

“The issue,” Sin says, right as Neil asks, “What hands-off rule?”

Roland blinks. His daemon’s tongue flickers again, and her head curls towards his ear. “You don’t know?”

“These are from a fight. Why would Andrew do that to me?”

“You don’t know,” Roland says again, this time not a question. “Wow, let’s forget I said anything at all. Look, your drinks are done, I need to go -”

He melts away, leaving Neil and Sin and the tray of drinks along. Sin says, “What the fuck was that about?”

“Don’t ask _me_ ,” Neil recommends, shaking his head. He feels raw-nerve exposed and double-checks his wrists are properly covered before lifting the tray to carry it back to the table. Kevin and Onyx are there and Neil wants to tell them to leave, but he knows Andrew won’t allow it.

Instead he sits sideways in his chair and says to Andrew in German, “Why does Roland think you’re tying me up?”

Andrew has a glass in his hand half raised to his mouth, but the question makes him pause and put it back on the table. His eyes flicker to Neil’s hands – his wrists, now covered, where Andrew had seen for himself the damage just this evening, up close and personal.

In the interminably silence that follows, Sin pushes off of Neil and climbs onto the table, curling her tail around her paws, prim and proper like a little sentinel. The lights turn her dark and multi-coloured in time with the music. She looks like she’s about to start demanding answers next, and Neil wouldn’t put it past her.

“He must think you’re as bad as doing what you’re told as he is,” Andrew replies eventually.

“That isn’t an answer.”

“It is the answer,” he corrects. His calm voice does nothing to ease Neil’s sudden unexplainable anxiety. “If you don’t like it, ask another.”

“I’ll trade you. Let’s play another round,” Neil replies. “Roland also said you must have finally given in. What did he mean by that?”

“Don’t ask me questions that aren’t for me. If you want to know what Roland means, ask him yourself.”

Sin huffs. Neil hums instead, and says after a moment, “What’s above Coach’s pay grade?”

That had been what Wymack had said to fob Neil off the other day when he’d interrupted Andrew’s apparent grudge against their offensive line.

Andrew tilts his head a little bit, tapping his index finger against the tabletop. “Coach always says he doesn’t get paid enough to deal with our personal problems. I think he’s a liar, but he makes a good show of it.”

“Since when was I a personal problem? I thought you hated me.”

“I do hate you,” Andrew says. “Doesn’t mean I wouldn’t blow you though.”

Sin goes stiff, her tail knocking an empty glass so it almost falls over. From under the table there’s a thump, like a large daemon just hit something. Impressively, Andrew doesn’t flinch.

“You like me,” Neil says, blank.

“I hate you,” Andrew corrects.

Sin opens her mouth, and then closes it. Neil is probably doing the same, a fish out of water, because as much as his brain is suddenly racing to put everything together – tonight, his conversation with Wymack, Andrew’s agreement to trust him with Kevin, the _key –_ it falls apart just as fast. There’s no way. Neil doesn’t know what to think, or what to say.

All he knows is that Andrew, in his brash and horrible way, isn’t lying. Neil says, “Why didn’t you say anything?”

“Why would I bother?” Andrew replies.

Neil blinks at him. “Why would you _bother-_ ”

“Nothing will come of it,” Andrew cuts him off. He shrugs. “I’m self-destructive, but I’m not stupid.”

The implication that – Neil doesn’t know what, exactly, could even come of it, or certainly can’t imagine it right now. But the implication that Neil would be a stupid decision is more right than Andrew knows, so true that Neil has to swallow anything else he might have said.

“Okay,” he says weakly, and then has to watch as Andrew finally drinks the shot Neil had interrupted, and then stands. Under the table there’s more shifting, and Amaranth appears at Andrew’s side. Her dark eyes flicker to Neil and then away again – she looks as calm as Andrew does.

Before they can leave, Sin says to Andrew, “It’s your turn.”

He flicks the pair of them a look over his shoulder as he shakes a cigarette out of the pack and then pushes it back into his pocket. “I’ll save it.”

 

* * *

 

Neil should at this point know better than to antagonise Ravens – or, for that matter, their fans.

The parking lot is a mess of smashed eggs and rocks and broken glass. Some cars are just scratched, but the Fox cars aren’t so lucky. Matt’s truck lists drunkenly on four slashed tires, the windows empty of glass and the body sporting dozens of dents. Allison’s convertible isn’t much better, more red than pink thanks to the raw meat smeared on it.

The ‘traitor’ sprayed into the hood of Andrew’s car makes Neil swallow, even though it isn’t aimed at him. It’s the dead fox atop the pile of garbage inside the car that makes him pull back.

“Subtle,” Sin says. Her voice shakes on it.

 

* * *

 

It’s no surprise that everything between Aaron and Andrew ends up a fight. Not least because Neil has brought it to a head, involving himself and then Katelyn in the mess. Now Neil's standing in shoes still bloodstained and watching them do it.

It’s more surprising that Celeste and Amaranth don’t make it physical. The two of them are twins just the same, and Neil has known since the second he saw all four together that that meant something.

Aaron and Andrew, despite their differences, are the same at the heart of them. Dressed up differently in anger and apathy and bravery and uncertainty and fear, but still brothers.

“You’re even now,” Neil says to the both of them, aware he’s risking a broken face or a knife wound to say as much, considering it worth it even though his survival instincts should be better than that. “Wipe the slate. A life for a life – that seems like a fair trade to me.”

“You have no idea what you’re talking about,” Aaron snarls back. Celeste is silent beside him like she almost always is, but there’s unmistakeable tension in her body.

“I know exactly what I’m talking about,” Neil replies. “You just don’t want to listen. After all, if I’m right, that means it’s your fault your mother is dead.”

Andrew sighs through his nose. “That was her fault,” he corrects lazily.

Aaron’s attention flickers from Neil to his brother, the anger finally focussing. “She didn’t kill _herself_.”

“She signed her own death certificate when she raised her hand to you again,” Andrew tells him. They’re a study of opposites, Andrew glacier-cold in the face of Aaron’s rage and grief. “I warned her.”

“Fuck sake,” Wymack says. Neil thinks for a moment the reminder that the others are there will stop Aaron from going on, but instead he swaps to German.

“That isn’t why you did it,” he says.

“Why else?” Andrew asks. “I cared nothing for her, remember?”

A shadow passes over Aaron’s face, there and then gone. He says, “You don’t care for me, either.”

“I made you a promise,” Andrew replies. “I did exactly what I said I would do, and fuck you for thinking anything else.”

His tone is as flat as ever, but there’s something unfurling in him. Neil looks to Amaranth, and finds her looking at her sister, them mirror-images nearly touching noses. She’s so still, but the wild anger in Andrew reflects in the hard lines of her face and body. Celeste looks away first, and then Aaron bows his head to avoid Andrew’s gaze.

The avoidance does nothing to soften the rage, like Aaron’s emotions being put aside in resignation to losing this fight are feeding Andrew’s. It’s Amaranth that breaks the tableau first, moving back to Andrew’s side and bumping her shoulder into his hip. He reaches down and curves his clenching fingers into her ruff, and just like that it seems he extinguishes his crackling temper.

Except Neil knows he’s just pushed it deeper. Deep enough it’ll only hurt the two of them, not anyone else. Neil finds he can’t meet Amaranth’s eyes either, after that.


	4. lupus

He sits on the curb after his conversation with Wymack, head spinning. This is a ride he needs to get off but doesn’t want to, knowing all the while it ends with a direct hit to a brick wall, knowing that he needs to tell people as much but not able to make the words come out.

_Vice-captain._

Sin paws at his knee. “Call him.”

She doesn’t have to elaborate, because Neil knows who she means. “We should leave.”

“Too late for that,” she replies, huffing on the reminder like Neil is wasting her time. “Call him.”

When he hesitates longer, she says, “You promised.”

Without looking away from her, he takes his phone and dials. He’s still stuck on the idea of a future he won’t ever get – Fox captain, and Court after that. He’s known all along that he’s overreaching, asking for more than he deserves, but it’s still an awful ache to look those things in the face and know he’ll never have them.

He’s thought all along that he’ll start to accept it all eventually. The injustice of his life. But even if he takes the Moriyamas down with him he’ll still end up dead, and right now the idea of it being over once and for all is deep enough to drown in.

“Neil,” Andrew says from the other end, because Neil hadn’t noticed the line click live, and has been quiet for too long.

He breathes in, lets it out. “Come and pick us up. We’re at the court.”

There’s no answer – when Neil pulls the phone from his ear, Andrew has already hung up.

“Does that mean he’s coming, or not?” Sin asks, but it’s rhetorical. They both know Andrew will come. When Neil looks at her, she looks as worn thin as he feels. She looks less annoyed with him than usual. It would be comforting if it weren’t for the fact that it’s usually over him being overdramatic. Her agreement with him – is it grief if he hasn’t lost anything yet? – somehow becomes unsettling instead.

The Tower is close, but it’s fifteen minutes before Andrew pulls up in the parking lot, coming to a halt right next to Neil. He has Kevin with him in the passenger seat, Onyx perched on the top of the backseat. They stay put, looking at Neil through the windscreen, as Andrew gets out and opens the back door for Amaranth.

On the curb, the both of them tower over Neil. Andrew looks bored by the sight of them and whatever he can read from their faces, and it’s such a relief Neil thinks for a second he might be sick.

“I don’t want to be here,” he says, a little helplessly.

Andrew inclines his head, then turns on his heel. He’s left the doors of the rental hanging open, and leaves the back door for Neil this time. Onyx has already hopped forward onto Kevin’s lap, so Neil goes in first, then Sin, then Amaranth so she can sit at Andrew’s back. It means he has to lean past her to shut the door. He feels the ghost of her breath and body heat on his skin as he does so, but she seems unbothered by his proximity.

Sin, for once, is disinterested in talking, and she flops over Neil’s thigh facing away from them. Kevin throws them a glance but says nothing as Andrew pulls away from the curb.

They take the I-85, and right now Neil doesn’t care enough to ask questions. He lays a hand over Sin and sinks into a numb doze, only briefly surfacing to the sound of Andrew’s voice saying, “Don’t,” to someone on the phone.

He wakes properly when the engine cuts out, Kevin and Onyx getting out and letting a gust of cooler air into the car. He dazedly watches the flash of her stretching her wings flying a tight circle over Kevin and the cars in the dealership they’ve arrived at.

The back door on Amaranth’s side opens, and Andrew leans down to catch Neil’s eye as she slides out of the car. He says, “Either get out or stay in here.”

He means _those are your only options_. He knows why Neil called him. Neil suddenly has no doubt that Andrew would drag him back to the Foxhole Court by his hair if he chose running as a third choice, and knows in the same second that Andrew won’t have to.

He feels Sin’s lips draw back from her teeth, the smooth shape of enamel against the side of his hand. He not sure whether she means to bite or speak but either way he beats her to it.

“I’ll stay,” he says.

 

* * *

 

Neil thinks he’s ready to return to Fox Tower, but when Andrew parks up his new car, he finds himself unable to stomach the thought of facing the rest of his teammates. They take the stairs up, but when they reach their floor Sin keeps going upwards. Neil hears the door slam as Kevin retreats to his room, but footsteps follow them.

Andrew passes him a cigarette as soon as they step out into the open air of the roof. Neil accepts it, walking across towards the edge. Without a handrail the drop feels risky – too far to survive, not far enough to kill him straight away – but he steps up to it anyway. The stomach-dropping height mixed with the scent of cigarette smokes does a little of the work of forcing him back into his bones.

“Neil,” Sin says. He turns back to her, finding her sitting on her haunches and watching him with her head on a tilt. Andrew is sitting cross-legged back from the edge, staring into the distance past Neil as he smokes. Amaranth is at his back, as she almost always is.

Neil goes and sits with them, allowing Sin to climb her way into his lap and curl into a warm ball there. In his peripheral vision, Andrew holds something out to him.

Neil takes it by instinct – and that’s a new instinct, apparently, because a year ago he would have flinched violently instead – and then realises what it is when he folds his fingers around it. It’s one of the keys to Andrew’s new car, the gleaming black beast that they’d just picked up. Neil stares at it for a very long moment, dry-mouthed.

“You are very predictable in your issues,” Andrew says after a moment. He’s watching Neil, expression inscrutable.

“That’s because you and I are similar,” Neil retorts. Amaranth huffs, but when he flicks her a glance there’s no way to know whether it’s meant as agreement or the opposite. “Cash has never been an issue, but there’s a lot of paperwork involved in _belonging_ anywhere. Having a home – that’s never been something we’ve been allowed.”

He looks up from his curled fist into Andrew’s face, meeting his gaze. “Years of running, and Coach was the first to give me keys to something that are mine. And you’re the first who told me stay. It’s the closest I’ve gotten to ‘home’ since my parents died.”

Andrew’s hand at his cheek forcibly shoves Neil’s gaze away from him. “It is just a key. I’m not the answer that you are looking for.”

“I’m not,” Neil starts, and then swallows the words that would be a lie. He’s lied to Andrew enough.

The truth is that he’s looking to an answer to _why:_ why this, why now, why him. The specifics escape him, and he’s less clear than ever on what exactly he wants and needs after the last few days. He swears he smells blood and sees _Junior_ smeared into a wall every time he closes his eyes. He does it anyway, even as Andrew’s hand holds him turned away.

“You know what it’s like to be nothing,” Sin says quietly, directly to Andrew. “Sooner or later, you get tired of it.”

Andrew’s fingers slip off of Neil’s face, and Neil opens his eyes as he turns back around. The expression on Andrew’s face that greets him is familiar – it’s recognition, in its purest form. Black-eyed understanding from the man who’d said _you can’t cut down someone who’s already in the gutter_ and meant every word of it.

“You are a Fox,” Andrew says. “You will always have and be nothing.”

Neil stubs out his cigarette beside him, grinding it into the concrete. Andrew’s words don’t sting like scolding, but he aches to hear them all the same. Swallowing, he says, “Who named your daemon?”

“Why?” Andrew responds. He’s looking back into the distance – out, not down.

“My parents’ daemons named Sin. I guess I was just curious where the name Amaranth comes from.”

“I don’t know. Some well-meaning individual in the system, perhaps.”

“I Googled it. The meaning.”

“Congratulations.” Andrew’s reply is very flat, a half-hearted warning.

Neil ignores it. “I think it suits her. And you.” He has no doubt that Andrew knows what he’s talking about. Amaranth, the flower that never fades, a name given to the daemon of a man who has bled for his loyalty. To Amaranth herself, who right now is looking at Neil dead-on, quiet and thoughtful. He looks to her, and then back to Andrew, letting his thoughts flash over his face.

“I hate you,” Andrew says, stubbing his cigarette out.

“The more you repeat yourself, the less I believe you,” Neil replies.

“Your opinion is irrelevant,” Andrew says. Then, his hands are back on Neil’s face. Then, he’s kissing Neil.

It’s like no kiss Neil has ever experienced before. He has about a second’s worth of clear thought to compare it to the very few others he’s had before it’s all wiped out by the pure intensity of Andrew’s mouth against his. He barely catches himself before he mirrors Andrew and cradles his face, hooking his fingers into the sleeve of Andrew’s coat instead.

The movement is enough to make Andrew pause and pull back. “Yes or no?”

Neil stares back at him, wordless and just barely aware of Sin frozen in his lap. His mouth is buzzing-numb, and his heart is threatening to beat out of his ribcage. For a long moment, he thinks _this is why I should have run_. Somehow, he swallows it, and does not retreat.

Before he manages to speak, Andrew removes Neil’s hand from his coat. “I won’t do this with you right now.”

He leans away, shoulders tight in a way Neil can’t really recognise. It’s not anger, that’s all he knows for sure. He watches Andrew light a new cigarette, and the way Amaranth leans up against his back in something that has to be comfort. It’s strange to watch Andrew accept that, even a version so subtle. Maybe Neil is missing something, and it’s meant as something else entirely.

He’s confused. His mouth hurts. When Andrew stubs the cigarette he’s just lit straight out after one drag and then lights another, he steals it out of Andrew’s hand, careful not to touch him skin to skin. He puts it down beside the butt of his first.

“Why not?” he asks, and then considers if the question should really be _why not now?_

“Because you are too stupid to say no.”

Sin pipes up with, “Do you want him to say yes?”

The term ‘cunning fox’ was never meant to apply to her. There’s a sleek, smug look on her face, though it falls off with a squawk when Neil tugs her tail.

The look Andrew gives her is utterly unamused. “Nothing about that was a yes.”

“Not what I asked,” Sin mutters, and then squawks a second time when Neil pushes her off of his lap.

Andrew doesn’t watch this happen. He says, “I won’t be like them. And I won’t let you let me be.”

Neil’s stomach sinks like it’s full of lead, and then a second later rises into his throat. He swallows it. “I can’t believe the others call you monster.”

Andrew ignores this. Amaranth is the one who replies, “We are monsters.”

“No more than us,” Sin retorts from where she’s pushed herself upright, with a surprising amount of fire. “Next time someone calls you that, I’m biting them.”

Neil has no doubt she means it. He can’t bring himself to scold her, because he’s imagining doing the same thing.

 

* * *

 

The countdown he keeps getting on his phone that he won’t even talk about with Sin, the key of Andrew’s car in his hand when he takes Nicky out to pick them up ice cream, and Andrew’s quiet face are all reminders of the same thing: Neil doesn’t have much time. Neil doesn’t have much at all, and somehow now Exy isn’t enough to mean he’ll go into the grave satisfied.

Nicky’s disappeared down the hall to raid Matt’s collection of DVDs, and Neil flicks the lock on the door behind him. Across the room, Sin springing onto Amaranth’s back is more than enough of a distraction from that. Amaranth sits up onto her haunches, sending Sin sprawling onto the carpet, and then pins her to the floor with a forepaw.

Neil forgets sometimes how large Amaranth is until he sees her with Sin. He feels the dull pressure of her weight against his own ribs. It’s not painful – there’s really no excuse for the way Sin squalls.

Amaranth snatches her paw up off of Sin, dropping her head down to examine her. She gets a lick to her muzzle in response, Sin’s lips pulled back in her version of a grin. Amaranth snorts and lies back down on her belly, though she ignores Sin pushing in alongside her to sap warmth.

When Neil looks to Andrew, he seems to be ignoring them entirely. He’s rolling his ice cream between his palms and staring into the middle distance, though Neil certainly earns his attention when he crouches in front of Andrew’s beanbag and takes the pint from his hands.

“The other day you said you wouldn’t do that with me right then, in particular,” he says. “What would it take you to reconsider?”

“Is this another breakdown?” Andrew replies. There’s no edge to his voice or his face, but he’s looking right at Neil.

“No,” Neil says, and means it.

“I already told you once that I’m self-destructive, not stupid,” Andrew says. “You are a bad idea.”

Neil considers saying _that didn’t stop you kissing me_ , but doesn’t. “That’s not an answer.”

“You already know the answer. Give me a yes or a no that I will actually believe.”

“Yes,” Neil says almost immediately.

Andrew pushes off of the beanbag and onto one knee in front of Neil, curling his fingers around Neil’s chin. He seems to be examining Neil’s face like he doubts the truth of his words.

“Andrew,” Neil repeats, because he feels like he might need to. “Yes.”

“Be quiet,” Andrew says, and pushes Neil down onto his back, then follows him.

 

* * *

 

The Foxes make it through their first death match.

Dan runs into Matt’s arms, letting him pick her up off her feet and spin her around. The other Foxes pile in around them as the subs race onto the court – even Kevin, who lets Matt hook an arm around his shoulders and jostle him in excitement.

Andrew is a calm-faced sentinel in front of his goal, removing his gloves. Neil throws him a glance before he’s dragged into the celebrations by Nicky, letting the Foxes swallow him up.

Then, they beat Nevada by a point in a shoot-out, Kevin scoring the last goal after Andrew turns one of the Tornadoes’ seven strikers away. Then, they get on a bus for Binghamton on the same day that Neil gets a ‘0’ in his inbox.

The others are up the front of the bus, desperate for even the entertainment Kevin’s rant about the Bearcats can provide. Neil looks forwards towards them, watching the snappish bickering between Onyx and Allison’s Zyden where they’re perched on the back of Allison and Renee’s seat, and Esme on Nicky’s shoulder, and Matt and Dan prodding Kevin to spill his thoughts. They look like a team. Neil feels a bright burst in his gut at the sight.

His phone is still open his hand. He doesn’t delete the message, the only one he’s kept so far, and then puts it away and turns to Andrew instead. He has to push up onto his knees to see properly, folding his arms on the metal at the back of the seat and resting his chin on them. Sin mirrors him, propping her muzzle on his forearm too.

Andrew ignores the both of them. He has Amaranth sprawled across the seat and half over him as usual, her head resting on Andrew’s thigh. She isn’t asleep, but she doesn’t look at them either.

The pair of them are very still in the light, Amaranth’s coat dusky and Andrew’s hair bright gold with sun falling from the window. Neil feels unsettled at the sight, and he isn’t sure whether it’s because of them ignoring him, or just because of them in general.

“Stop,” Andrew says without looking up.

“Stop what?” Neil replies.

“He doesn’t like you looking at him,” Sin mock-whispers, earning herself a cool look from Andrew at last.

“He doesn’t like most of the things I do,” Neil replies to her directly.

“I hate you,” Andrew reminds him.

“Don’t you get tired of making everything into a fight?” Neil asks.

“Don’t you get tired of seeing everything as an excuse to run?”

“I’m still here, aren’t I? As far as I can see, I’m not the one who keeps falling back on bad habits.”

“We made a deal based on my habits,” Andrew says. “Or does it not count, if you’re the reason I’m fighting?”

“I don’t want you to fight for me anymore,” Neil says. It’s not just because the guilt over throwing Andrew into a battle he can’t win for the sake of Neil’s love of Exy. “I want to hold my ground on my own for once. I can’t do that unless you let me go.”

Amaranth lifts her head, looking up at them with much the same expressionless expression as Andrew is wearing. Neil wonders what she sees on their faces.

“Why change your mind now?” Andrew asks.

“Maybe I’m tired of bending. Maybe I learned something this year after all,” Neil replies. “Hey, maybe I learned it from you. Either way, I don’t want to run anymore. I want to stay.”

“Sooner or later, you’re going to regret that.”

“Only one way to find out,” Sin chirps.

“Don’t come looking for me when someone makes you bleed from the face,” Andrew replies, glancing away.

Sin snorts, and climbs down from Neil’s shoulder like she’s offended by the insinuation that Neil would run to Andrew if something went wrong. Neil ignores her, and says, “Thank you.”

“Don’t thank us,” Amaranth says, shifting her weight on the seat. It’s not an invitation for Neil to continue the conversation, just a short rebuke, and Neil accepts it for what it is. Not reluctance, but maybe something like it.

He turns his eyes out the window, watching a snapshot of cars and rugged asphalt of another interstate. They’re familiar as breathing – he can’t remember the number of times he’s fallen asleep to the view and then woken to one the same but just a little different. Back when his mother was the one in the driver’s seat. The more things change, the more they stay the same, or something like that.

 

* * *

 

Neil made a promise to the Foxes that they wouldn’t lose any games this spring, and he means to keep it.

At halftime they’re down two points to the Bearcats. They only need to score three to advance to the next round thanks to their differential, but Neil doesn’t want to advance on a loss after their win against Nevada. It wouldn’t feel right.

Lining up to walk back onto the court is always a strange sensation, because it’s the first and hardest attempt at putting distance between them and their daemons in the cages. Neil has never had attachment issues, because they’re dangerous – he remembers training against it with his mother and her daemon, him crying and retching while Sin fought to get to him – but even he feels the drag of leaving her behind.

This once, he has a distraction. Aaron and Andrew are at the rear of the line, and Neil slides alongside them. He’s aware that the clock is ticking down to start of the second half, because the crowd is screaming overhead – he’s running out of time. He focuses instead on Andrew, a stone of calm amongst the tension of the rest of the team.

“Last month, you shut the Catamounts out,” Neil says. “Can you do it again?”

“Can I? Probably,” Andrew replies. He isn’t even looking at Neil.

“Then will you?”

“Why should I?”

Neil doesn’t have time to list the reasons, and he doesn’t think they’ll sway Andrew anyway. He says instead, “I’m asking you to help us.”

The door clicks open as the referees open the door. Andrew tilts his head as he looks out across the court, considering. “I won’t do it for free.”

“I’ll give you anything you want,” Neil says, stepping back to take his place in the line up. He has no idea what he’s promised, no idea what Andrew will take from him, but he knows it’ll be worth it. He also knows it won’t be something he can’t give.

He wonders, as he takes his place on court, if this is what trust feels like.

 

* * *

 

They win.

They also fight, though Neil keeps Kevin out of it. They’re first off the court and to their daemons, Onyx swooping to Kevin’s forearm and Sin trotting to Neil’s heels. She hates getting his sweat on her fur, complains bitterly about it like she hasn’t at least once walked through an open drain to get away from people chasing them, so he doesn’t pick her up.

Neil is on press with Dan, whose proud ocelot daemon Lorimer sits beside the microphone like an elegant statue and doesn’t say a word. Neil always makes Sin sit on the floor because he doesn’t even trust himself not to say something inadvisable, let alone her.

It’s easy to stay positive tonight though, having kept up their winning streak. There’s only one game between them and semi-finals, something that Dan points out with a wide grin. She looks a little predatory under the excitement, her eyes set firmly on the prize, and Neil doesn’t blame her. They’re breaking Fox records with every advancement, and Dan herself is breaking more so as their female captain. Neil can’t help but look at her and think she deserves it more than any of the rest of them, Kevin included.

The showers are still running when Neil makes it to the changing room, but there are stalls so he doesn’t have to wait for the others to finish. Sin refuses to come into the stall with him because she’ll get wet from the spray, perching on the bench outside instead. His listens vaguely for her voice as he washes up, but by the time he’s dressed and comes out of the stall the room is empty besides her.

He’s repacking his bag when the phone goes off in the pocket. He has half a thought that Nicky is ringing him to hurry him up before he flips it open and reads the number on the screen.

He swears his heart stops. It’s not a number he knows, but it’s been a long time since he had a call from a Baltimore area code.

Sin, seeing his expression, cranes to get a look at the screen of his phone. He just barely hears her indrawn breath over the sound of his own, deafening in his ears.

She says, “Don’t run.”

His entire body is straining to bolt. He looks in her eyes, reaches out a hand to her because her fur on his skin always makes him feel real.

“It’s too late for that,” she whispers, which is when he realises that he really has no choice but to answer it.

“Hello?”

“Hello, Junior. Remember me?”

Neil’s mouth goes dry. There’s no way he could forget that voice. Lola Malcolm is a part of his father’s inner circle, and the one who was tasked with teaching him to use a knife before he was ten years old. An expert at disappearing corpses who posed as a smiling assistant to Nathan’s businessman during the day, her wolverine daemon at her heels. Neil has no idea what she’s been doing while Nathan has been in prison, but he suspects he is about to find out.

“How did you get this number?” he asks, his voice rasping a little.

“I suppose that answers my question,” she muses. “That’s bad news for you, Junior. You know why, right?”

“I’m sure you’re going to tell me.”

“Because you are not where you are supposed to be. And because you apparently know that,” she says silkily. “Listen carefully. Your time playing at freedom is over. If you make this difficult for us, you will only live long enough to regret it deeply.”

_Us_ means that Lola is not along, but that’s no surprise. Outrunning her alone would be difficult – her and her brother and Jackson together will be inescapable. Sin was right: it’s too late for that.

“You can’t touch me,” Neil says. “I’m here with an entire team, and they won’t leave without me.”

She laughs. “You think your father cares about a college team?”

“My father is in Seattle. What does he matter?”

“Your father is in Baltimore,” she says. He can hear her smile. “Oh, you didn’t hear? I suppose the feds didn’t see the use in letting a dead boy know. He was paroled, and they released him this morning. I think they’re hoping being on home turf will make him sloppy. They’ll never know you passed through.”

Neil is so, so stupid. It’s been too late for him all along. It’s too early – he’s so close. But it’s over now.

“As for your teammates,” Lola continues. “Unfortunately we can’t kill them, but we can hurt them. Pain is _such_ a good distraction.”

She hangs up on him. Neil swears violently and then calls her back, but it goes straight to voicemail. He considers throwing the phone but stops himself – his hands are shaking too hard anyway.

“Neil,” Sin says, her voice cracking. He stares at her blankly, his mind examining every escape route and then tossing them aside one by one. He’d told Andrew he wouldn’t run, but he refuses to put the others in danger any more than he already has. He swallows.

“The feds,” Sin says, and it’s a last gasp but Neil grasps it with both hands. He probably won’t survive spilling the truth now anymore than he thought he would at the end of the season, but he’ll do it to save the Foxes.

He throws his bag over his shoulder, and then picks Sin up and curls her against his body rather than having her over his shoulders like usual. He can feel her heart pounding against his chest in time with his own, and he wishes for a moment he could spare her.

“Stay with me,” he says to her, which makes no sense. She tilts her head back to look at him, her eyes honey-dark and serious.

“You’re stuck with me,” she replies, with a twist of wry humour.

Bolstered – at least he won’t die alone – Neil hurries out of the changing room. The lounge is down the hall, full of rowdy Foxes watched over by a security guard that Neil can see through the glass door. The guard looks up at the flash of Neil coming towards him in his peripheral vision, and Neil stops dead.

It’s Jackson Plank.

“Fuck,” Sin mutters into his shirt, her entire body tense. Neil wants to retreat, but he knows he can’t. Jackson touches a hand to the gun at his hip as he looks through the glass at Neil and smiles.

Neil throws his hands out in a wordless plea for Jackson to leave his teammates the hell alone. Jackson, still smiling, looks away.

Neil walks down the hall and opens the door, not quite flinching away from Jackson through pure will. Nicky’s the closest to the door, and grins at the sight of him and Sin.

“Hey! We were wondering if you’d drowned,” he chirps.

“I’m sorry,” Neil says, numb. If he’d run, Nicky and Esme would have been first. They wouldn’t have had any idea that something was coming until it was too late.

Nicky flips a hand carelessly, and joins the rest of the team in collecting their bags in preparation to leave the lounge. Neil watches them and counts, desperate to fix each and every second in his memory. There’s Tau and Renee, quiet and graceful, with Allison and Zyden beside them bright with victory. Matt and Piper grinning the same way, broad and enthusiastic. Even Aaron, one hand resting on Celeste’s back. Wymack and Allegra, and Abby and her bear daemon, watch over all of them, triumph written across their coach’s face.

He’s already missing them like there’s a whole in his chest. It must show on his face, because Andrew crosses the room to stand in front of him, Amaranth at his heels.

Neil looks at him and finds he can’t leave without saying anything to him. He swallows, debates German and then puts the idea aside as potentially suicidal.

He says, “Thank you.” The words are too small for everything they encompass, but he figures Andrew will know what he means once he’s gone. Whether he’ll appreciate them then, Neil doesn’t know, but it doesn’t really matter. He’ll be dead either way.

Sin wriggles in his arms, a silent demand to be put down that he obeys without complaint. She goes straight to Amaranth, brushing noses in a way that Neil feels at the base of his spine like electricity. He wonders if Andrew feels it the same way. Sin whispers something to Amaranth, but Neil can’t hear it and doubts she would tell him anyway.

Wymack orders them out, and Neil turns to go, expecting Sin to return to his heels as they leave. He’s already turned his back on all of them and fallen in behind Romero Malcolm when he feels something deeper, sharper, along one side of his entire body.

He doesn’t know how he doesn’t make a sound. It feels like – knowing. Half of his conscious thought is wiped out by the sensation, overtaken by a sudden and overwhelming awareness of Andrew.

It happens to fast for either of them to say something. Neil turns back, lets Sin leap back into his arms like she didn’t just brush against Andrew’s calf on purpose and rip all of them open to one another with one reckless movement, meets Andrew’s eyes for a split second – and then they’re leaving.

Outside, Neil’s senses are blown wide. There’s a noisy crowd jostling around the stadium, reeking of alcohol and yelling. Neil stays at Romero’s back like he might use his body as a shield for the rest of his team, struggling to regulate his breathing again.

The Fox and Bearcat fans in their separate colours are already yelling slurs at each other, though the ones in orange and white cheer the Foxes as they approach. None of the Foxes engage either side – two security guards likely don’t feel like enough protection from a restless crowd, even if they were real security guards.

In the end, it doesn’t matter. They’re halfway to the bus when a bottle goes overheard, falling amongst the Fox fans with a smash. Another follows it, and Neil hears Aaron curse as it hits home. The police crowd closer, trying to yell over the increasing number of outraged cries from the drunken fans.

A cooler crashes through the air, forcing Lorimer and Dan to leap out of the way. It hits a Fox fan instead, and after that there’s no order to be had.

Romero’s hand locks around Neil’s wrist as the two sides of the crowd crash into them like waves. He drags him through the crush, preventing Neil from going down. His duffel bag is wrenched from his shoulder, and Sin is forced to cling across his body with her claws so she isn’t pulled with it. He stuffed his phone into the pocket of it after speaking to Lola – it’s gone too. He feels sick at the thought, but there’s no way Andrew will think he’s left willingly if he’s left those things behind.

As soon as they break free of the riot, Neil starts struggling, and Sin leaps from his arms. Romero’s daemon is a stoat and curled somewhere on his body out of danger of the crowd, but Jackson is right behind them. He grabs Neil’s arm and jerks it behind his back so hard Neil gasps, and his mongrel dog daemon darts after Sin. She leaves a savage trio of scratches across her face in response, but she has no choice but to follow Neil as he’s hauled away.

There’s a police car parked on the far side of the parking lot that they drag him towards. Neil can see the dark hulk of Lola’s daemon by the back tire, but he can’t see her.

“Let go of me,” Neil snarls, fighting even though Jackson could dislocate his shoulder with very little effort.

There’s a yelp from behind him that makes him dig his heels into the ground. Jackson swears, but then laughs, spinning Neil with him when he turns to look back.

“Neil,” Sin says, her voice terrible with fear. Lola is behind them, and she’s snatched Sin up, holding her in the air like a child’s toy. As soon as Neil’s brain computes the sight, the wrongness of it hits him.

He would fall, if it weren’t for Jackson’s hold on him. As it is, he retches.

“A fox daemon for a little runaway,” Lola says through her wide smile. “Not so little anymore, though, are you, Junior?”

“Let her go,” Neil says. Those are the only words he knows. He’s too weak to struggle.

“Begging already,” she says. “I like that.”

She gets in the car, taking Sin with her. Neil practically climbs in after her on numb limbs, not even needing any extra force to make him go. Dead men don’t have the luxury of pride, and she could kill the both of them with one twist of her hand.

Once they’re in the backseat of the car, she tosses Sin like a ragdoll to her daemon where he’s crouched in the footwell. It stuns Sin, and the wolverine holds her under a massive paw, his bone-crushing jaw hovering over her. Neil can’t look away, even as he’s secured with handcuffs to the seat.

“I’ll save her for later,” Lola says. “First, it’s your turn. Nathaniel.”

 

* * *

 

He comes to lying on concrete, with Jacinth nosing at his face. She’s shivering, dripping warm gold blood that falls to the ground and then blows apart into particles afterwards.

He looks at her blankly, and then to his own arm. It’s all burns and crusted blood, and it takes him a moment to make the agony of it make any sense. They’re in the cellar. Neil knows that’s bad.

“Nathaniel,” Jacinth whispers. He curls a hand over her body, and gasps with the pain of moving his knuckles to do it. It does at least make his brain work faster, and he forces himself to sit up.

Lola is sitting on a chair watching him, a gun curled in her hand. Her daemon is pacing in front of the stairs, his lumbering form belying the speed he can travel at if he needs to. Neil has seen him run – he has no interest in seeing it again.

“Don’t bother,” she says, watching where his gaze has gone to. “Those teeth would snap your ankle in a second.”

“You could just shoot me,” Nathaniel points out. His voice comes out rusty, like he’s been screaming. Speaking sends fresh agony through his face.

“Oh, no, Nathaniel. That would be too quick for you. You have caused your father a great deal of trouble, did you know that? I think he might like to drag it out.”

“You could have just left us alone,” Nathaniel replies. “We were never going to be a problem for any of you.”

“Don’t be a child,” Lola says. “The money alone would be enough of a reason to reclaim you, but the shame – that’s another thing entirely.”

Nathaniel stays on the floor, Jacinth in his lap. Having her close isn’t enough to soothe either of them this time, because neither of them can forget the sick sensation of Lola’s hand on her.

It takes an hour for anyone to come. Nathaniel hears the door open at the top of the stairs, and Lola gets to her feet as her daemon returns to her side. She looks at Nathaniel and smiles, and he forces a steady expression onto his face. He refuses to look afraid – this won’t be any quicker if he confirms to them that he is.

Nathaniel’s father looks exactly the same as he remembers, like it hasn’t been two years since Nathaniel saw a photo in a news article about him being sentenced to prison. He’d smiled then, grateful for a reprieve. He isn’t smiling now.

Nathan’s daemon is a wolf, her coat shattered with brown and grey and white. Nathaniel has seen her splashed in blood, gold and scarlet, and knows the calm chill expression on her face as she sits at the base of the stairs is a ruse. He has always been terrified of her, even though she has never touched him. Nathan himself is wearing his work clothes, good quality but plain. He means to get bloody himself, then. His cold eyes go directly to Nathaniel, scanning him from the floor up.

“Get up,” he commands. Jacinth flinches at the sound of his voice, and Nathaniel’s spine turns liquid.

He wants to stay on the floor, but he’s on his feet out of fearful instinct before any sign of rebellion can make an appearance. Jacinth stays by his feet, her ears pinned back against her skull and her tail flicking. She casts a look at Lola and her daemon as they circle behind Jacinth and Neil, but then reserves her attention for the real threat.

“Nathaniel,” Nathan says. “Welcome back to Baltimore.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Remember when this fic was gonna be three chapters? Yeah, me neither.


	5. canis

He ends the night kneeling on the front lawn of his father’s house, holding Jacinth to him with hands that are past hurting.

“We’re alive,” she whispers to him on a sob. Somehow it drowns out the sound of gunshots echoing over and over in his head. “He’s dead.”

 

* * *

 

There’s faith, and there’s knowing that Andrew won’t leave without seeing Nathaniel first.

The real question will be whether Andrew pauses long enough for Nathaniel to apologise before taking his head off. It might end up being for the best – Nathaniel doesn’t know what to say to him anyway.

Browning’s SUV pulls up in front of a Fed-infested motel and they bundle Nathaniel out. Jacinth is curled over his shoulders, partially obscured with an oversized jacket and the folds at the back of his hood. The wounds on her haunches are healing faster than any of his, but she’s not moving any more athletically than he is right now.

“Twenty minutes,” Browning reminds them as he and his badger daemon lead them up the stairs to the second floor. When he knocks on one of the doors, it opens a crack to show a suited guard with a scowl on his face and a big Alsatian daemon. He looks at Nathaniel before turning to Browning.

“I don’t like it,” he says.

“Noted. Watch him for a moment,” Browning replies, and steps by him with a brisk clap. “Listen up, people. You’ve got twenty minutes. Let’s keep this orderly and have only one person up at a time.”

The guard on the door lets Nathaniel straight through – into a wave of protests from the Foxes all objecting as one to Browning’s proposal.

“Twenty minutes? You’re kidding me,” Dan snaps, before she sees Nathaniel in the doorway, hood pulled up around his face. The shift in her expression isn’t anger – it’s relief, pure and laced with fear. “Neil, oh my god. Are you alright?”

Nathaniel hasn’t got the words to reply. It’s the sight of them that does him in, bruised and exhausted but still here when he thought he would never see them again. And as much as seeing them is a relief like every soft thing in the world, he knows that this is a goodbye. He can’t see him leaving out that door without breaking into pieces.

There’s Allison and Renee, with a pair of black eyes and both Renee’s wrists wrapped like she doled out some serious injuries in the riot. Tau and Zyden are perched side by side on the back of the couch in a riot of feathers. Kevin’s throat is bruised dark, and his face plain with something like grief as Onyx preens his hair from her perch on his shoulder. Nicky is red-eyed and crumpled with Esme in his lap; Matt and Dan are holding each other back and upright at the same time, Matt a total mess; even Aaron looks upset rather than apathetic.

One pair is missing though. No one is meant to be seriously injured, and Wymack has the excuse of shifting the bus, but Andrew and Amaranth are nowhere to be seen.

There is tight fear in Nathaniel’s voice when he starts to say, “Where’s -”

There’s a slam from behind him, bodies colliding with bad-quality panelling. Nathaniel turns just in time to see Andrew push his way inside the door, Wymack tight on his heels and forcing the guard aside with the bulk of his body. Then there’s the distinctive sound of Amaranth’s high-pitched cry as she tumbles past in a snarling heap with the Alsatian daemon. It’s a whirl of noise and shouting, but Nathaniel’s attention locks down on Browning going for his gun.

He aims directly for Amaranth, reacting to the threat of her size and ferocity. Later Nathaniel will think there probably isn’t much chance of Browning actually shooting when his own man’s daemon is so close, but right now he just moves.

He grabs at Browning’s arm, pulling him off balance. The pain that goes through him almost makes him collapse, but it does the job – he’s in the way himself now, hands held to his belly and burning all over again, and Browning is unlikely to shoot his prime witness either.

“No,” he says, or thinks he says. Then there’s a hand at the back of his neck a bare fraction away from Jacinth’s spine, and he’s going to his knees on the carpet under the weight of Andrew’s presence at his side. When he opens eyes he doesn’t remember closing, his vision is blocked by spiked grey fur – Amaranth, head low between her shoulders as she vibrates with aggression and noise on every exhale.

Jacinth drops down into Nathaniel’s lap, sniffing desperately at his hands there. It feels like there should be blood, but his bandages stay clean.

“Leave them,” Wymack snaps, voice heavy with fury. He’s standing over them because he and Andrew are handcuffed together, but Nathaniel can’t look at him or the others trying to get around him because he’s so focussed on Andrew kneeling before him.

Andrew’s expression is still, but there’s inexorable force in the clutch of his fingers when he takes Nathaniel’s chin to examine him. His own face is marked up with bruises, the signs of a hard fight. That’s Nathaniel’s fault, and he can’t stand the sight of them.

Andrew shoves the hood off of Nathaniel’s head, ignoring both him and Jacinth where she’s curling into his thighs in favour of peeling the bandages from his face. The cuts on his right cheek earn nothing more than a glance over the stitches, but the burns on his other cheek makes Andrew pause.

There’s no shift in his face, but the tightness wound into his body is a bad sign.

“Neil,” Amaranth murmurs, her tone indecipherable and barely audible over Wymack’s, “Fucking Christ, Neil.”

She’s quiet, but Jacinth stiffens all over in response. She’s been curled up, but unwinds, her face tilting in Amaranth’s direction. Andrew’s daemon is no longer pulsing with fury, though it’s still there in the tightness of her spine.

“Amaranth,” Jacinth says in a little voice that wobbles like a sob. She won’t leave Nathaniel’s lap, but Amaranth deals with that by dropping her huge head down to Jacinth’s level so their foreheads gently bop together. Andrew’s hand curls into the front of Nathaniel’s hoodie, all of Amaranth’s same anger in the shape of his shoulders. Nathaniel wants to touch him very badly, but doesn’t.

“I’m sorry,” he says instead.

Andrew’s teeth grind together and his clenched fist draws back behind his head, but he doesn’t actually hit Nathaniel. It shakes with the effort – either from clenching his fingers so tight or from holding back. Nathaniel says nothing until his hand uncurls itself within the restraints of the cuff.

“Say that again and I’ll kill you,” he says. He’s all honesty. He means it down to the core.

“That’s enough,” Browning cuts in. “I’ve already warned you – if you can’t behave -”

“You’ll what?” Nathaniel dares him over Amaranth’s ruff.

“You are only here because I have allowed it,” Browning reminds him. “Another strike and this little meeting is over once and for all.”

Andrew shifts like he means to stand, but Nathaniel darts in to make a square around his face and capture his attention back. As much as Nathaniel understands wanting to use violence against Browning right now, it’s unnecessary and troublesome when words will do. He’s watery-bones grateful that Andrew complies with the unspoken request to stay with him, and that Amaranth is too focussed on Jacinth to bother.

Once Andrew is settled again, Nathaniel looks back to Browning. “I’m here because without me you don’t have a case. Corpses can’t tell you anything, but I can. This is the cost of that, the one you agreed to pay, so take off these handcuffs and give me the twenty minutes our bargaining bought me.”

There’s only one option, and Browning knows it. After a long chilly moment, he gestures the guard forwards to remove the cuffs. Nathaniel doesn’t have to look to know that Amaranth watches the guard and his daemon both until they’re out of reach again. He’s busy watching Andrew stretch the fingers of his freed hand while Browning and the guard retreat to the door.

Once they’re out of reach, Amaranth presses closer again. She says, quiet, “The attitude is real.”

“We were going to tell you,” Jacinth murmurs back.

“Do not lie,” Andrew says, dull.

“We’re not. We wanted to tell you last night, but they were waiting,” Neil replies.

“Who was waiting?” Browning asks.

Without a pause, Nathaniel switches to German. “The ‘guards’ were there for me – my father’s people. I thought if I kept quiet they wouldn’t hurt the rest of you. I didn’t know they’d planned a riot.” He taps very lightly against the stark bruise by Andrew’s eye.

“The martyrdom play doesn’t suit you,” Andrew replies.

“So you keep telling me,” Nathaniel says. “It kept you all alive this time, though. A riot’s more survivable than a bullet.” Because that had been the alternative.

“Shut up,” Andrew tells him.

“You told me not to lie.”

“You haven’t been very good at following those instructions before,” Andrew says. “What happened to your face?”

“Dashboard lighter,” Nathaniel says, swallowing against the bile in his throat. Jacinth makes a noise of remembered agony, like a whine. The sound Nicky makes is worse, a moan in his throat. When Nathaniel turns to look, he accidently flashes his burns to the rest of the Foxes.

Kevin flinches so hard he nearly unsettles Onyx, hand to his own cheek. Aaron has moved to Nicky’s side, Celeste letting Esme cling to her. It’s Matt who demands, “Neil, what the hell did they do to you?”

Abby has been hovering at a distance, her helper’s hands twitching at her sides, but that seems to be the last straw for her. Nathaniel watches her come around the bed before Andrew presses his face around and turns to her to snarl, “Get away from us.”

“He’s hurt, Andrew. Let me help him,” Abby says, hands out like she’s facing off with a wild animal. It’s probably fair: Amaranth has risen and turned to face her, and she’s not growling anymore but her stance alone is a warning.

“Don’t make him repeat himself,” she says in her rough voice, clearly audible. It’s so shocking that Abby pauses mid-step to stare. Her own daemon is back by the bed. Amaranth is speaking to directly because Andrew seems to have lost his words again to fury – Nathaniel has shredded his control down to the bones.

It’s an anger that will not touch Nathaniel. He pushes his fingers into Andrew’s hair and tugs it softly until he has his attention.

“I just came from the hospital,” he says to Abby, without looking away. “There’s nothing you can do for me right now.”

“Neil -”

“ _Please_ ,” Nathaniel says, and it must work, because the tension in Andrew’s fingers at his face finally eases. Without moving his hand, he murmurs in German, “Did they tell you who I really am?”

“I choked the answers out of Kevin before they got the chance,” Andrew replies coolly. “He said your father would kill you. So how are you alive?”

“My uncle had him executed,” Nathaniel replies. Andrew choked Kevin – that explains the bruises, but Nathaniel can’t quite put it together in his head. It seems impossible, for all Andrew just risked a gunshot wound to get in arm’s reach of them. He tentatively presses a hand to Andrew’s heart over his shirt, at once certain and unsure of his welcome. “I thought this would all end with him killing me, too. It seems too easy that he’s dead and I’m alive.”

“Was it easy?”

“Not even he could survive a chest full of bullets,” Nathaniel replies. “My uncle thinks he can make a deal with the people he worked for. I don’t know if it’ll work, but I hope he wouldn’t have made such a bold move if he didn’t have something to offer. Just tell me no one has told the FBI about any of this.”

“None of them have said anything since they refused to let us see you,” Amaranth replies, pressing her weight into Andrew’s side. There’s so little space between the four of them that Jacinth finally creeps out of Nathaniel’s lap and into the shelter of Amaranth’s body. Her proximity to Andrew’s knee makes Nathaniel think of her touching him, but he swallows it

“But why?” Nathaniel asks.

Jacinth says, “We’ve done nothing but lie and put them in danger. They could have all been killed last night. Why protect us now?”

“Because you’re Foxes,” Andrew replies, simple as silence.

That answer finishes the job of cracking Nathaniel through the centre. He swallows hard through the tightness in his throat, trying to push it aside but failing. His voice is crooked when he says, “They want to take us and hide us so the rest of my father’s people can’t finish what he started. I don’t want to go but – if you tell me to, I will.”

If that happens, the cracks will widen and he’ll shatter. He thinks that is more than clear from his tone, all yearning, but he knows Andrew would have heard it even if it wasn’t. He feels a burst of protectiveness through Amaranth and Jacinth in turn, in time with the tug of the finger Andrew hooks into Nathaniel’s shirt. It feels like a key in his hand. It feels like home.

“You aren’t going anywhere,” Andrew says, a promise, in English because he’s starting a fight even as he ends the one inside of Nathaniel. “You’re staying with us. If they try to take you away they will lose.”

 

* * *

 

Nathaniel is Neil, and he tells the feds everything.

Or, not quite. He circles the Moriyamas carefully, knowing his life might depend on his discretion, but everything he knows about his father’s operations he lays bare to them.

Afterwards, they give Neil a pile of papers and a pen, beginning with an application to officially change his name. It takes him a moment to understand ‘Neil Josten’ is the name written across every form, and to realise that they’ve won.

“This is a contract with us,” Browning says. “Once you sign these, ‘Neil Josten’ will be on the road to becoming a valid member of society. That means you don’t run ever again. You so much as use a fake name to pay for porn online and we’ll have questions for you.”

“I’ve heard you can get that for free,” Sin quips.

“Fine,” Neil says, before Browning can snap something at her. He picks up the pen clumsily in his bandaged hand and scrawls his name in every place there’s an space for it, then pushes them back across the table.

Browning takes them and passes them off to some gopher. “We’re done. If we have any more questions, we’ll be in touch.”

Neil is sure of that. He shifts in his chair and waits for Amaranth to stand from where she’s lying behind it, then climbs to his feet. Every muscle protests the movement, making him aware of just how long they’ve been in this windowless room.

“I’ll have someone give you a lift to the hotel,” Browning says, and leaves. True to his word, someone comes to get them and leads them down to his car. He and Andrew end up in the backseat with Amaranth and Sin between them, the two daemons shoulder to shoulder. Sin, apparently frustrated with this arrangement, curls her body between Amaranth’s forepaws and lies on her side. Amaranth allows this without a twitch.

Up in the hotel room, they find the Foxes have spread out across the floor for the night. Abby and Wymack are the only ones left in the original room, and Wymack is the one to open the door for them, his daemon at his heels. After looking the four of them over, his gaze goes to their escort.

“I guess you’re my ride,” he says. When he gets a nod, he waves the rest of them inside and steps out of the room. “I’ll be back in a minute. Figure out if we can leave.”

He closes the door firmly behind himself, and Neil listens for their footsteps retreating down the hall. When he turns around Abby is waiting in the middle of one of the beds, her arms held out to Neil. She says, “Let’s have a look at you two.”

It’s tricky to untangle Sin from himself, but he manages to put her down on the bed. She allows Kristos to examine her with his surprisingly dextrous paws, murmuring to her gently as he does so. Neil can’t crawl over the mattress, so he kicks off his shoes and walks across it instead, sitting in front of Abby to mirror her. There’s a dip behind him as Andrew perches on the foot.

Abby works silently and efficiently, but her face is a giveaway to her thoughts. Neil remembers this from after Evermore – her grief over him, when no one had ever felt that way because of him before as far as he was aware. Neil concentrates on the sting of her cleaning and recovering the wounds on his face as a distraction.

When she moves onto Neil’s arms, Andrew shifts closer to get a glimpse of them. Neil looks across to Sin, who is impatiently letting Kristos wipe something over the slashes in her haunch, her tail flicking in and out of his way. He feels her pain more clearly than his own in a way, more immediate in his chest.

“Neil, my god,” Abby says, stricken and pulling his attention back. Before he can really think about it he glances to his arm where Abby is holding it out, slashed and scabbing and burned systematically from elbow to wrist. For a moment he can’t make sense of it – it looks too neat to have been done purely to cause pain.

His knuckles are the worst of it, burnt so badly Neil flexes his hand just to make sure he can. Then he does it again. Then he’s back in the car with Lola, Sin struggling against her daemon’s grip and turning the air blue while Neil is silent. Then Lola is reaching for Sin, and using the knife on her.

He can’t breathe. A hand grips the back of his neck, pushing his head down and holding him in place. Neil half-struggles against it as he hyperventilates, unable to stop himself and get a proper breath.

He can’t believe that he might have survived all of this to lose Neil Josten anyway. After all, Neil is an Exy player who might make Court. Neil Josten can’t have hands that refuse to work, marred beyond him being able to hold a racquet. He clenches his fist, feeling the scream of scabs tearing.

“It’s okay,” Abby says, her fingers gentle in his hair. “It’s over now. We’ve got you.”

There’s the sound of movement beside them, and Kristos gently deposits Sin in Neil’s reach. He can’t make himself take her, but she crawls into the hollow between his lowered chest and crossed legs anyway, her muzzle to his ear as she murmurs something to him he can’t even make out.

Then a jolt goes through him, and he sucks in a full jerking breath before he even really realises why. It – it’s the same feeling from the lounge back in Binghamtom, and it’s because Sin’s ear has just brushed against the tips of Andrew’s fingers where they’re curled at his nape.

Neil drags in a second breath, and then a third, the tension seeping out of him and leaving him quivering and limp in Andrew’s grip. When Andrew pulls him back upright, the first face he looks to is Sin.

There’s no apology on her face. There’s knowing there, though, right at the forefront of her bright umber eyes. He doesn’t have the words to say anything to her, just lets her weight hold him down and promises himself he’ll bring it up later.

He’s safe with Abby and Andrew. He focuses on that, and Sin, and keeps breathing.

 

* * *

 

Every Fox and their daemon end up gathering in Neil and Matt’s room to sleep back at the Tower. Neil lies down in the middle of the room despite knowing it’ll be impossible to escape if he needs to get up in the night, with Andrew and Amaranth at his front and Matt and Piper at his back. Sin curls up on his pillow, her tail tucked around the back of his neck.

With everything that’s happened tonight – including telling his teammates the entire truth – he should be awake for hours obsessing over it all. Instead, he feels emptied out and unable to worry. His friends are safe and they’re here with him, despite everything. He’s asleep before he even knows it.

He’s one of the first awake the next morning, but even so the sun is already high in the sky when he opens his eyes. He’s still facing Andrew, though Sin has crawled down from his pillow into his arms during the night. She snuffles awake when Neil stretches his aching body as much as he can without disturbing anyone else.

Andrew’s eyes open at the movement. There’s no way he was still asleep – he’s completely alert, his steady gaze meeting Neil’s dead on.

There’s a very long moment where Neil looks at him and thinks of nothing but the shape of him, familiar as Neil’s own reflection, and feels heart-stopping gratitude for the fact that they are both here and still alive.

Then he remembers Andrew in the hotel room, kneeling in front of him, going up in flames because of Neil but not at Neil’s expense. And Andrew in the conference room with the feds, quiet but intent. And Andrew last night, so careful with his personal space, but lying down beside Neil anyway.

Sin is, of course, the one who breaks the moment. Her eyes are scrunched shut against the light, and she sleepily shoves her snout under Neil’s neck to hide from the light, muttering, “No,” as she does it.

It tickles, and Neil jerks and makes a noise, loud enough to startle Matt into wakefulness behind him with a snort. Amaranth clearly takes this as a signal to get up, climbing over Celeste and Esme on her way to the door. Celeste’s snarl and the squeak Esme lets out mean all the others wake up with various complaints.

“Sorry,” Neil says to all of them as one. Sin’s, “I’m not,” is muffled but still clearly audible, by Dan’s sleepy laugh.

Andrew is already to the door, blankets thrown over his shoulder – he throws one look back, to Neil and then Kevin and then Aaron and Nicky, before he and Amaranth leave the room.

His movement seems to spur the others into a semblance of wakefulness, besides Kevin and Onyx. Kevin shoves his head under his pillow, while Onyx hides hers under her wing where she’s perched on the back of the couch. Nicky prods Kevin in the ribs, and nearly gets smacked in the face for his trouble.

Dan watches this happen from where she’s sat up behind Matt, making a wry face. Her hair wildly askew and she looks tired, but she’s smiling a little bit too.

“I think we might have to change our breakfast plans to brunch,” Renee says, checking the time from the far side of their nest of blankets and pillows. Tau has been sleeping on the couch above her, and he unfurls his neck from his back to start rearranging her hair with his beak.

“No dining halls,” Matt rasps. His eyes are still closed, though Piper’s nudging at the backs of his knees with her nose. “They’re closed for break.”

Allison is ruffled but the most awake of all of them. “Let’s go to Adele’s. They do breakfast food all day.”

“I would kill a man for bacon right now,” Nicky says. He’s grooming Esme’s fur with his fingers.

“I just want a shower,” Dan adds. “Hotel showers are just never right.”

Matt rubs his face, and then sits up briskly. “Right, okay. Let’s go.”

He starts to push himself to his feet like he’s using the momentum to get him going, but Dan stalls him by grabbing his shirt in her fist and pecking him on the forehead. Then she lets him go and pats him on the chest before standing herself, Lorimer uncurling from her blankets and stretching like the cat he is.

“We’ll meet down in the parking lot in forty-five minutes,” she says. “Greasy food and coffee is waiting for us.”

Allison had opened her mouth to complain, no doubt about needing more than forty-five minutes, but she’s distracted by that. “God, _coffee_.”

They clear out quickly after that, taking their pillows and blankets with them. Kevin and Onyx stay behind, though Kevin has uncovered his face and is staring blankly at the ceiling like he’s trying to will his brain online. Neil knows why he’s sticking around, but despite the peaceful sleep he doesn’t think he has the energy for it. He pulls himself upright and follows Matt to the kitchen, watching him get the coffee pot going.

Neil needs to take his medications, but he pauses halfway through because he can’t open them. When he casts his eyes around for a cloth or towel to make it easier, he finds Kevin in the doorway with Onyx on his shoulder.

Sin, obviously too sore to jump up onto the countertop for once, says, “What?”

“When Riko hears about your face, he will retaliate,” Kevin says in French.

Matt, clearly used to them speaking in other languages, doesn’t even turn to look. Neil watches him and Piper for a moment as they wend their way around the kitchen, setting up the grinder and pouring coffee beans into it.

“Can he do anything about it?” he asks, in English, without looking at Kevin.

There’s a long pause as Matt freezes in place and flicks a look to Neil, and Kevin does not go on. But Neil – Neil is done lying to everyone, and the older Foxes in particular. And when they already know the entire story now, there’s no point hiding things anyway.

“By now Kengo knows that my father is dead but I am not,” he continues. “And that I’ve talked to the feds. I don’t think Riko can do anything until Kengo makes a decision one way or the other on me.”

He looks to Kevin at last, who has crossed his arms and is studying Matt coolly. He says in English, “By erasing your tattoo, they’ve labelled him insignificant. He’ll never tolerate that insult. If he thinks he can get past his father to get to you, he will.”

“Compared to my father, he is insignificant,” Neil points out. “I’ve never been afraid of Riko. If he wants to bring the fight to me, he knows where I am. I’m done hiding.”

“Your bravado is not helpful.”

“It’s not bravado. I wanted to avoid him before because he knew who I was. Now he’s lost that leverage, because everyone knows. Andrew thinks the Ravens will let all this play out in spring championships, that they don’t have a choice anymore if they want to erase all doubts about them being the best. That means the rest of you are safe, too.”

“And you believe that?” Matt asks.

Neil shrugs, though he’s still looking at Kevin. “Yeah, I do. And seeing as Riko’s hands are tied, it’s the perfect time to get rid of your tattoo too.”

Kevin flinches, making Onyx mantle and twist her head. “Don’t joke.”

“You think I’m joking? Allison said she’d loan me the money to get mine removed. Maybe she’ll extend the courtesy to you.”

“She definitely would,” Matt agrees. “Think of the drama.”

“Shut up,” Onyx demands in her shrill bird-voice. Sin bristles.

“Don’t tell them what to do,” she snaps.

Onyx leans forward on Kevin’s shoulder, flashing her beak, but backs down. Like Kevin, she isn’t really made for a fight. Sin definitely is, and she looks like she might make a leap for Onyx even injured. Neil nudges her with his socked foot, feeling the tension in her body.

“You’re finished being second,” he tells Kevin. “Don’t you think it’s time to tell him that, once and for all?”

Kevin turns on his heel and storms out. He leaves the door hanging wide, though it’s not obvious why until Amaranth noses back into the room, Andrew right behind her. They go past the kitchen and sit down on the blankets, and after a moment Sin darts after them.

Matt flicks the pot on to brew, and says, “I’m going to get in the shower. I’ll be quick.”

Neil waves him off, listening to him going down the hall to the bathroom and closing the door. He finds a dishtowel and opens his meds to take them before following the tug of Sin into the lounge.

Andrew is cross-legged on the blankets, a roll of duct tape and some black garbage bags at his side. Amaranth has flopped back down onto her side like she’s bored.

Sin, meanwhile, is sitting nearly between Andrew’s knees, and appears to be staring him intently in the face. Andrew isn’t staring back, and neither of them appears to be speaking. Neil walks over and nudges Sin with his foot again.

“You should apologise,” he tells her. He doesn’t say what for, but he figures it should be obvious. Andrew does not like to be touched. Sin has touched him twice now without permission, and even without the added taboo of her touching another person, she never asked for Andrew’s consent.

“Maybe I already did,” Sin says, moving aside so Neil can lower himself back onto the blankets.

“She didn’t,” Amaranth says without moving.

“She knows better,” Andrew cuts in. It’s the first thing he’s said since yesterday, Neil thinks.

“I didn’t realise you hated the word ‘sorry’ as well,” Neil says, before he really thinks about it. The look he gets in response is very bland. “She shouldn’t have done that. Not without asking.”

Andrew doesn’t reply, instead focusing on removing Neil’s hoodie. Neil lets him, and then continues to let him mummify him in plastic and tape. In the end, Andrew pulls a blanket from underneath them and sweeps it around Neil like a cape, pulling the ends together too when Neil struggles.

There’s the sound of the bathroom door opening and the bedroom door closing, and then Matt comes out again fully dressed in record time, his hair still falling down over his forehead and a comb in his hand.

“We’re going next door,” he says, as Piper overtakes him. “Come around when you’re ready.”

“Alright,” Neil says. Andrew stands and follows Matt to the front door. Neil would think he was leaving to shower, but Amaranth doesn’t move from her splay across the floor. When the door locks, it does so from the inside. Neil ignores that and lets go of his blanket, heading to the bathroom.

The intricacies of showering seem almost overwhelming, but he hasn’t showered since after the game and he figures that by now he doesn’t have much of a choice. Sin looks from him to the interior of the bathroom and says, “I’m staying out here.”

She’s always hated getting wet, more like a cat than a fox. It feels wrong to close a door between them so he leaves it open and she flops down across the threshold. He turns away but a second later hears the sound of her voice and turns back to find Andrew stepping carefully over her – and Amaranth, who by the feel is lying beside Sin – and into the humid-warm bathroom.

His expression is bland, but there’s an intensity with which he presses his fingers to the scars on Neil’s exposed chest that make him impossible to look away from. Neil could swear there’s consideration in the flicker of one corner of his mouth, but he isn’t sure whether it’s of Neil or aimed internally.

“Andrew,” Neil says, and when Andrew looks up and meets his eyes Neil leans in to kiss him. He’s half expecting Andrew to push him away, but there’s no hesitation there at all. Neil loses himself in it for a moment, lets it wash over him, tries to drown out the uncertainty of being unsure where he stands with Andrew.

It was one thing to do this with Andrew when Neil was so sure Andrew would be unmoved and steady after it – and Neil himself – was over. But Neil just saw first hand the opposite of Andrew unbothered, and now – he doesn’t know.

“You are a mess,” Andrew informs him without putting any space between them.

“What else is new?” Sin says from outside the door. Neil can peripherally feel that she and Amaranth are curled into one another now, and he thinks Sin might be licking Amaranth’s face a little bit.

He doesn’t say anything when Andrew closes the door on the two of them.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Lol bye.


	6. crocuta

On their first night at the cabin, Neil goes to get a glass of water and ends up punching Aaron in the face.

It is, to be fair, provoked. It is also a terrible decision, because the pain of it almost makes him sick and leaves him curled around his own fist.

Celeste is bleeding from a scratch on her face that Sin left there, and they’re circling each other. Sin has no chance against a daemon so much bigger than her, even as quick and as angry she is. It doesn’t matter anyway, because Celeste has no interest in fighting back. Nor does Aaron, who touches a finger to his mouth to check for blood and then leans down to get a better look at Neil’s face.

“Fuck you,” Neil says.

“Nicky thinks it’s hate sex, nothing more,” Aaron says. “I think I know my brother better than that.”

“It’s none of your business.”

“And Katelyn was none of yours, not that that stopped you,” Aaron replies. “You told me to fight for her. Do you think he’ll do the same for you?”

“No.”

“I think we’ll know for sure soon enough.” Aaron shrugs on it, and then leaves, Celeste following him. As soon as she’s gone, Sin limps over to Neil, ears flat back.

“Asshole,” she mutters. “You okay?”

“Fine,” Neil says, and when she shoots him a look, “Don’t start.”

It’s not like she doesn’t know what he’s feeling, just like he knows that she just pushed her wounds more than she should have going after Celeste. Neil sometimes misses the days where they both used to lie to each other about being okay because telling the truth of they felt seemed too likely to shatter them completely. Sometimes.

Aaron has left the door open to the kitchen, and Neil starts a little when a dark shape appears against the glass. It’s only when she says, “Come inside,” that he recognises Amaranth.

Neil expects Sin to have something to say in response to that command, but instead she trots across the balcony with her limp suddenly gone. He follows, pausing in the kitchen to drink his glass of water. The quiet other than Sin and Amaranth murmuring to each other gives him a chance to swallow the last of his fury at Aaron.

When he returns to the living room, he takes the chair he left before and does not even look at Aaron so he isn’t tempted to hit him again. It doesn’t go unnoticed that when Amaranth returns to Andrew’s side, she has a black-and-silver shadow who seems intent on stealing her body heat: Neil catches Allison elbowing Matt out of the corner of his eye.

 

* * *

 

Neil wakes without Andrew, Sin curled safe in the lee of his body and still asleep. The window is cracked, letting in air unfamiliar with pine and fresh rain and not a single trace of anything else. The mountains are nothing like what Neil, city born and raised, is really familiar with.

It takes him a moment to realise that there’s another weight pressed into the mattress beside him. When he cracks his eyes open he finds himself half a foot from a gently breathing hulk of soft grey-brown fur smattered in spots. Andrew might not be here, but Amaranth is.

She isn’t asleep, either. When Neil stretches a little around Sin, careful not to jostle her, her head turns so she can watch him with her quiet dark eyes. Her ears flicker back and forwards once, and she drops her chin down onto her foreleg with a sigh.

“Hey,” Neil says very softly. Here and now, she’s nothing like what she was in Baltimore, snarling and spiked with aggression. The dichotomy is all Andrew, though – the man who’d put himself at Neil’s level on the motel floor, teeth bared and on the very edge of his control, is the same one who taped over Neil’s hurts and washed his hair and kissed him in the aftermath.

She huffs back at him wordlessly, wiggling her snout into the covers so she’s within an inch of his face. At this distance, Neil is suddenly aware of how this is the only being on this planet that Andrew lets closer to himself than he does Neil. The intimacy is unmistakeable as Amaranth’s intent, her gaze still and patient and unchanging.

He curls his bandaged hand on the blanket where it lies between them, Sin under the crook of his elbow. It puts his fingers at the same distance from Amaranth’s muzzle as she is from his face. It’s an offering, plain as the daylight falling through the window. Neil isn’t the kind to take – he wants to prove that goes for Amaranth as much as it does for Andrew himself.

There’s no expectation there. Neil closes his eyes, lets his breath out slow, feels everything at once until it narrows to movement on the sheets and the very soft press of fur to his fingers.

There’s a familiarity there, from the sensation of this at the distance of his connection with Sin. It’s the same, with a dose of blinding, staggering power, so potent his breath catches. He pulls it back and opens his eyes, letting Amaranth press the round of her skull into the pads on his fingertips. When she realises he’s looking again, she opens her mouth in a big dog-like grin.

“Nice,” he tells her, and starts to scratch her behind her flickering ears. It sends another bolt through him, makes him shake a little.

Sin stirs, saying in a sleep-rough little voice, “What’re you two – _oh_.”

“Yeah,” Neil agrees, all wonder.

“Yes,” Andrew agrees from where he’s just slipped inside the bedroom door, two mugs of coffee balanced in one hand. Neil starts like a kid caught misbehaving, his hand drawing back, but he can’t help smiling when Amaranth whines at the loss of contact. He pushes himself upright, his thigh pressing into her side as Sin rolls just about on top of her in a wave of blankets and fur. The two of them fold together like bookends, silver-black to grey-brown, blinking at one another.

“Hi,” he says, meeting Andrew’s eyes. He looks sombre, ruffled with more than sleep, probably because the two of just shocked him from under his skin. No anger, just intensity, the kind Neil is happy to answer.

Andrew edges closer, putting down the mugs on the side table. They’re both half empty, rimed with brown like Andrew left most of their contents slopped on the floor between the kitchen and here. Neil only looks at them for a second before the weight of Andrew’s hand pressing into the mattress catches his attention, looking up just in time to take the kiss he’s offered.

When they break apart, Neil’s fingers are on Andrew’s, tracing the bright pink marks of a spill over his knuckles. He says, “Sorry.”

Andrew says, “Shut up,” and kisses him again.

 

* * *

 

When they meet Ichirou Moriyama in the back of a sleekly lavish black car, Neil is somehow unsurprised to find that his daemon is a raven.

The bird sits on his shoulder, with her clever black eyes fixed on Neil. Ichirou is very young in a very expensive suit, but he is nothing like his brother, and nothing like Nathan Wesninski. This is the man who holds their leashes. This is the man who was born to rule them, and who was raised to do it with an iron fist.

Neil allows himself one second to doubt his ability to survive this meeting. He does not let it show on his face. All he knows is that to make it through, he has to rely on his blood, Wesninski and Hatford together – criminals, all of them. Very intelligent criminals.

The entire time, Sin doesn’t say a word.

Afterwards, when the black cars have driven away and left him in an empty construction sight, he sinks down onto his knees and tries to get a grip on his panicked breathing.

Sin slithers down off his shoulders. “He should have a snake daemon too.”

“You think so?” Neil manages after he’s swallowed.

“Not really,” she concedes, and they don’t speak again until after they’ve passed on the good news to Kevin and Jean that they won’t be killed after all.

It’s after that when they’re alone that Andrew asks, “How does it feel to sell yourself off to the yakuza?”

“Worth it,” Neil says with a shrug. “I don’t need the money. I just need to be alive and have permission to live exactly like I want to. I might even do it long enough to die of old age.”

“You sound like them,” Amaranth says, faintly disparaging.

“You two are going to have to figure out what it is you’re living for, too,” Sin replies, nudging Amaranth pointedly with her nose. “The rest of us aren’t going to need you playing guard dog forever.”

“She’s right,” Neil says. “Kevin will be back on Court before he leaves PSU, and he thinks that I can make it onto their line too. If I can, you can. You know we’d be unstoppable. Choose us.”

“Your obsession isn’t something to build a life on,” Andrew says.

“It’s something. You know that as well as I do.” That’s sometimes the only thing people like them get. “In the meantime, you’ll have a place and a team. Use it until you find something you can hold onto.”

“And if I decide on something that isn’t Exy?”

Neil shrugs, brave in that way a little bit of knowledge about someone can make you. “Exy players earn seven-figure salaries. Even with what I have to pay to Ichirou, I’ll be able to afford plenty of cigarettes and whiskey.”

_Choose us_.

Andrew doesn’t reply to that, but before he leaves he shoves the package he’s been holding into Neil’s chest, forcing Neil to grab it. Once he’s disappeared down the hall, Neil opens the package and finds inside a set of armbands just like Andrew’s.

Sin looks up at him. “Cigarettes and whiskey?”

“I’m not the one who made a guard dog reference,” Neil points out, and then, “I think we’ve got a shot.”

“You know what?” she says. “Somehow, I think you might be right.”

 

* * *

 

They end up escorting Kevin to the court that night so he can work off his demons alone. Neil ends up watching right by the wall as Andrew, Amaranth and Sin sit on the home bench, Onyx perched on the railings behind them.

Kevin empties an entire bucket of balls into the same spot of the empty goal like a machine. It’s only the pause after he finds himself out of ammunition that reveals his malfunction.

“Pathetic,” Andrew observes, getting up.

“Yes, we’re obsessed junkies, we get it,” Sin replies distractedly. Out on the court, Kevin swaps his racquet to his left hand, and doesn’t swap back. “Uh, what is he…”

Neil thumps the wall, ignoring the bite of pain it causes, and is completely ignored by Kevin in return. Kevin picks up the ball, tests the weight of it, and then throws.

He misses his mark, the irritation showing in his shoulders. Then he picks up another ball and throws. It misses again. By the fifth try, his aim is good, and the next few balls hit dead centre of the goal.

“Andrew,” Neil says, flicking a glance over his shoulder to find that Andrew is already watching the spectacle. There’s the faintest twitch in the side of his mouth, but after a moment he turns away and leaves with Amaranth at his heels.

Neil turns back, and finds Kevin collecting balls up for another round. He thumps the wall again, and when Kevin flicks his racquet at him in warning. Neil huffs and looks at Onyx instead.

She hasn’t moved from her spot, and her focus on Kevin is absolute. There’s a patient stillness in her that makes Neil pause – he hasn’t seen this depth of consideration from anyone but Andrew in the Foxes, and he abruptly has to wonder whether Kevin has this same quiet perceptiveness in his core or whether it all went into his daemon.

“Is he going to hurt himself?” Neil asks her, before Kevin isn’t here to ask.

“Potentially,” she replies, though she doesn’t even spare Neil a glance. Frowning, Neil turns back and watches Kevin moving through drills with his left hand, slow at first but then picking up speed. He catches his throws on the rebound and throws them again, a whip-quick efficient dance back and forth in front of the goal. His aim is shockingly accurate.

Neil had forgotten the true extent of Kevin’s ability. Even knowing in his gut how good Kevin is, he swallows to see it in play now.

There’s movement in his peripheral vision, and Neil looks to find Andrew and Amaranth have returned. Andrew is in full gear, and watches Kevin for a moment while he straps up his gloves.

Neil doesn’t need to ask why. He watches Andrew put on his helmet, pull his racquet off of the rack by the door, and then push onto the court.

Kevin halts at the sight of him, and then looks to Neil with accusation on his face visible even through the face guard of his helmet. Neil mimes a broad shrug as Andrew makes his way to home goal, racquet slung over his shoulders.

It takes a direct hit to the helmet to make Andrew actually defend his goal. The next shot Kevin makes, Andrew sends it straight back at Kevin and returns the favour, sending the ball bouncing towards the ceiling off of the angle of Kevin’s helmet.

After that, it’s a fight, raw talent against finely honed skill. And as stubborn and talented as Andrew might be, he doesn’t stand a real chance against Kevin Day with a fire under his ass.

“Do you think they’re going to kill each other?” Sin asks absently. She and Amaranth have come up to the wall, sitting side by side as they watch. Sin’s casual tone is belied by the crawl of tension in her frame that Neil can feel mirrored in his own shoulders, he notes when he flicks her a split-second glance.

Amaranth doesn’t answer, her concentration absolute. Neil can see the flickers of Andrew’s temper flaring, but she looks calm. Onyx is still frozen in place behind them. It looks like all three daemons are afraid to breathe too deeply, and Neil’s own chest is tight too.

Kevin scores five points in a row, and then drops his racquet. Neil thinks for a moment that he’s blown his wrist, but realises he’s wrong when Kevin stalks to the goal and uses that same hand to shove Andrew into the wall and hold him there.

_Choose us_. When Neil had said that, he hadn’t quite considered that Andrew might be aggravated into killing Kevin a few hours later.

He moves to the door like he has any chance of getting there fast enough to halt that, but Amaranth’s quiet voice stops him anyway. “No.”

He pauses, and then notes what she already knows. Andrew is wound tight as a spring, but he hasn’t moved at all. He stands there and, by the look, listens to whatever Kevin is saying.

Even Sin doesn’t have a quip to make about that. They all watch as Kevin lets Andrew go and they return to practicing as though nothing ever happened.

 

* * *

 

They make it to semifinals, but it’s not until they walk into the Trojans’ court that it really hits home how far they’ve really come.

They are about to take on the second-best Class I team in the nation. It seems impossible in a lot of ways that they’ve made it here, but there’s no denying it when they’re standing here and looking at the red and gold-emblazoned stadium.

Kevin is the only one who looks anything other than completely petrified. Neil isn’t entirely sure whether that’s to do with him reconciling with Thea, but he suspects Kevin is genuinely happy to be back on the Trojans’ home court. Onyx takes off to stretch her wings, soaring over the plexiglass ceiling of the ring, and Neil manages to not tell Kevin that he’s in too much of a good mood.

She comes winging her way back as the main doors open, dropping to perch on Kevin’s outstretched arm. The flow of the crowd entering is more like a flood – the game is sold out, apparently. Wymack sends them all into the locker room to change out and prepare.

They don’t reenter the inner ring until thirty minutes to serve, and by then the court is packed full of spectators. This is a home crowd for the Trojans, but they still shout at the sight of the Foxes. The noise, already overwhelming, gets even louder when one of the Trojans breaks away from his teammates to approach their opponents.

Jeremy Knox is an impressive sight, not least because his daemon is a massive yellow-eyed lioness who pads near-silently at his heels. Named captain as a junior, he led his team to their second place last year. His expression is grave, but it breaks into a smile at the sight of Kevin.

Jeremy shakes Wymack’s hand briskly. “Coach Wymack, welcome to SoCal to you and the rest of your team. We’re excited to have you here.”

Onyx swoops off of Kevin’s shoulder and flies low over Jeremy’s daemon, who turns her head up to watch her skitter in to land. At the same time Jeremy bounds forward and claps Kevin on the back. “Kevin Day! I think you’ve got a thing for controversial team, but I must say I prefer this one.”

“Their performance is average.” That’s almost a compliment coming from Kevin. Neil sees Dan’s jaw drop as he continues, “But they are easier to work with.”

“You haven’t got more forgiving in the last couple of years,” Jeremy replies, though he’s smiling as he says it. Then the smile falls off. “Speaking of your old team, you certainly threw a cat among the pigeons a couple of weeks ago.”

Onyx lands back on Kevin’s shoulder, and Jeremy’s daemon comes and sits beside Jeremy. Her head comes past his waist, and he isn’t a short man. Kevin looks at the two of them for a long moment, deeply serious. He hasn’t given any confirmation of the rumours he started by implying to the press that his injury wasn’t an accident, and the Ravens have stood firm in denying it. That doesn’t mean people have stopped talking about it, though.

After a moment, Kevin says, “I have a backliner for you, if you have room on your line.”

Jeremy blinks at this, but lets Kevin lead him away so he can explain without being overheard. Or, at least, overheard by the humans and daemons polite enough to not listen in as Kevin talks.

Sin is not one of those daemons. In her usual position around Neil’s shoulders, her ears twitch, and she whispers to Neil, “I wasn’t expecting him to be that truthful.”

Neil adjusts his weight, uncomfortable for reasons he can’t quite explain, in the same way he’d been surprised at his own anger at the sight of Jean in Abby’s spare room, brought so low. He tries to imagine Jean and Felicienne calling this court and this team theirs, and finds that it’s easier than he expects it to be. Them following Jeremy and his daemon is a little trickier to picture.

Jeremy’s smile is long gone, and underneath that is something as still-eyed as his daemon. He gestures out to the court, and then past it to the stands.

“Huh,” Sin says, nonplussed.

“What?” Neil hisses out of the side of his mouth.

“He said yes,” she says. “I wasn’t expecting that.”

Neil flicks her a look from a bit too close, one eyebrow raised. She huffs and explains, “He said, ‘if you think he can make a place for himself here, of course we’ll take him. And at the very least, he’ll be safe.’ Happy now, eavesdropper?”

The hypocrisy in that statement makes him consider bouncing her off his shoulder, but he doesn’t because Kevin is leading Jeremy back over. Jeremy has a piece of folded paper in his hand, and he passes it over to Wymack.

“Sorry for the delay,” he explains. “We’ve been trying to avoid any backlash.”

“Backlash?” Dan asks.

Wymack hands the slip of paper to her, and says, “Their lineup.” Dan skims it and loses any colour in her face, almost going green.

She turns to Jeremy, captain to captain. “If you’re doing this out of pity, don’t bother.”

“Pity? No,” Jeremy replies. “This is for us, not for you. Watching what your team has achieved this season has made us reconsider our strategies this season – we want to find out whether we can stand against you as individuals, or whether we’re winning because of the size of our line.”

Dan reaches over to Kevin and shoves the paper into his hand without looking at him. “There are only nine names on there.”

“Two strikers, two dealers, three backliners and two goalies,” Jeremy says. “Don’t get us wrong, they’re our best players, but none of us have ever played a full game before. You’ve made it this far with these numbers, and we’re excited to see what we can do with the same.” He smiles, his teeth blindingly white.

“If you play like this, you’ll lose,” Kevin says blankly. “You’re mad.”

Jeremy’s smile grows into an all-out grin, proud as punch. “Coming from you, that’s a real compliment. And hey, you might be right. But either way, this will be one hell of a match.”

They stare after him as he and his daemon turn back to their team. Neil thought their unceasing sportsmanship was an act, but now he wonders whether it’s the same kind of ‘act’ as Wymack’s recruitment process is seen to be.

“That has always been the difference between the Ravens and the Trojans,” Kevin says. “Don’t let Jeremy’s demeanour fool you. Both teams are equally obsessed with being the best. The Ravens would never jeopardise a championship to improve, though. The Trojans? They’ll leave everything on the court tonight, and next season I can guarantee you’ll see the benefits of it.”

“I really don’t care,” Dan says faintly. “We’re going to win.”

For the first time since the revelation about Kevin’s parentage – maybe for the first time ever – he and Dan meet gazes and smile. Dan’s is fierce, and Kevin’s is hungry.

“They’ve given you a shot,” Wymack says. “Don’t waste it. They’ll run away in the first half unless you keep them in check. Keep the gap manageable, and then you’ll have a shot when they get tired.”

Dan blows out a long breath, then looks down at Lorimer at her side. “Okay, Foxes. Let’s do this.”

 

* * *

 

The Thursday before their Friday night final against the Ravens, Kevin skips their late night practice and leaves Neil in charge of teaching Raven drills to their teammates in his place. Afterwards, Neil finds himself anxious for more than one reason – facing off against the Ravens again is one thing. Leading the Foxes is another entirely.

Andrew and Nicky head to bed, but Neil stays awake and stares into space rather than actually studying for a long time. That means that he nearly jumps out of his skin when the door to their suite opens and admits a staggering Kevin.

He nearly falls into the room, Onyx flapping to regain her balance. Neil can smell the alcohol on him from across the room and opens his mouth to mention that, but pauses at the sight of the bandage on Kevin’s face.

“Really?” Sin asks from her spot on the desk. She’s trying for scornful, but she misses the mark a little. Kevin just stares at them while Onyx sloppily tries to order his hair, seemingly out of energy or coordination to do anything else.

Neil goes to him, peeling the bandage off of his face without permission beyond a half-hearted wave. Underneath it, the ‘2’ is covered. In its place is a black chess piece, stark against the sharpened lines of his face.

“You actually did it,” Sin says from the floor, peering up at Kevin.

“Riko can be King, if he’s so desperate for the title,” Kevin says, too careful. His breath is almost enough to make Neil drunk. “Most coveted, happy to sacrifice every other piece to protect himself. I won’t be a pawn in that. I’m going to be the most powerful piece in the game.”

There’s a soft shift of sound behind them, and Andrew says, “Queen.”

The sound of the door must have woken him and Amaranth. When Neil looks at him, he finds that Andrew is looking intently at Kevin. He comes over and catches Kevin’s chin, turning his head to examine the new tattoo. “Hm. I think he is going to be very angry.”

“Fuck him,” Onyx said. Kevin might be enunciating, but her words are slurred and over-loud. “Fuck all of them.”

“They should be afraid,” Kevin says, reaching up a hand to stroke her and nearly knocking her off of his shoulder instead. Neil reaches over and puts the dressing back on over the fresh tattoo, ignoring the slight tremble in his fingers. It’s excitement, not fear. He doesn’t think the others notice, besides Sin. Kevin and Andrew are too busy staring at each other.

Then, Andrew smiles. It’s a cold expression, one that increases the already-quickened beat of Neil’s heart. He says, “Now it’s getting fun.”

“Finally,” Kevin replies. Onyx clacks her beak in agreement, looking away from Amaranth.

It takes both of them to get Kevin into his loft, and Onyx only makes it up onto her perch when Sin makes a half-hearted attempt at chasing her. She tucks her head straight under her wing, and Kevin is asleep the moment he flops onto the mattress.

Neil, by comparison, is still riding out the adrenaline of everything. He bites his lip, watching Sin pace in front of his bed. It shouldn’t be obvious, but somehow Amaranth and Andrew realise anyway. Andrew grabs the front of Neil’s shirt and drags him out of the room, and he hears Sin complain as she’s herded out too.

Andrew presses him to the wall and kisses him hard enough Neil’s mouth buzzes. “You are so goddamn predictable.”

“And yet, you find me interesting anyway,” Neil points out. “I’ve been waiting for this for months, and you’ve been waiting longer. Tell me you don’t feel _something_.”

Andrew doesn’t lie, but he only needs to kiss Neil to distract him. It doesn’t matter – later, so much later it’s early even though he’s just getting into bed, Neil thinks that he knows the answer anyway.

 

* * *

 

In the Ravens’ court, they keep their daemons with them until the last possible moment.

Wymack pulls them in before they walk onto the court, clustering them close enough to be heard over the incessant roaring and stomping of the crowd above them. He’s a point of steadiness, for all he must be in his own way as nervous as the rest of them. The only sign of any uncertainty is the hand he drops to his daemon’s head.

“You all know pep talks aren’t my strong point,” he says, “but Abby threatened to skin Allegra and then me if I didn’t make an effort tonight. That means you’ll have to blame her if this is rough, because I came up with it under the threat of death.”

He catches each of their eyes and holds them for a moment. There are only nine of them against Edgar Allen’s crowds of black-and-red-clad players, so it doesn’t take that long. “Close your eyes for a moment and think about why you’re here. And don’t bother saying revenge, because you’ve already got that by getting this far when no one wanted you to.”

“If you’re thinking anything to do with Riko and the Ravens, you’re wrong. You’re here for you. Everything it took for you to make it to this night, everything it cost you and every time someone told you there was no point to even try, every time you thought you should give up and then didn’t – this is what you’ve bought yourself.

“So now it’s time for you do what you always said you would, and show everyone here what you’re made of. This is your moment. You might know how to lose, but you sure as hell don’t know how to die quietly. Put everything you’ve got on the line tonight, because none of you assholes can tell me you’ll roll over rather than fight for it. Riko might play at being a king, but plenty of kings have been killed in uprisings. Let’s see if we can make that happen.”

The warning buzzer goes off overhead. Wymack claps his hands. “Get those daemons squared away, and let’s go!”

“Foxes!” they roar in reply, and break up.

“I can’t believe he called us assholes in his pep talk,” Sin mutters.

“Can’t you?” Neil replies, going down onto his knee to deposit her into the cages. She turns and jumps her front paws up onto the rim so they’re of a height. She bumps her forehead gently against his, leaning into him for a second.

“Go well,” she says. “And wreck them.”

 

* * *

 

After a miserable first half, Kevin’s only real advice is an insistent, “Find a way.”

They’re Foxes, so they do. Starting with Kevin swapping his racquet to his left hand walking back onto the court like he’s born to it, and ending with Neil playing backliner with Riko as his mark.

Ending with Kevin scoring a goal in the last seconds of the game. Ending with Neil opening his mouth and saying to Riko, with the breath he can barely afford to waste on him, “I’d ask how it feels, but I guess you’ve always known what it’s like to be second.”

Ending with Andrew’s spectacularly good timing, turning away Riko’s intentional killing strike aimed straight at Neil’s head and shattering his arm with the same quick movement.

Andrew puts his body between Neil and Riko, expression bored as he watches Riko writhe. Neil could watch the same thing all night, but his view is blocked after a few moments by his teammates and an insistent muzzle prodding at his face.

He reaches out to push her away, touches fur, and then realises that it’s Amaranth in his face and not Sin. Someone draws in a breath at the sight, but that’s the sole sign of anyone noticing – they mostly seem too busy trying to establish if Neil is actually hurt. Amaranth herself takes only a second to realises he’s fine and pads to Andrew’s side, leaving just Sin putting her paws up on his chest so she can look into his eyes. She says, insistent, like she’s said it more than once, “Neil.”

“Hey,” he tells her. His voice is almost non-existent, but his heart is beating so hard he’s sure she’s moving with it. “We won.”

 

* * *

 

It really ends with Ichirou Moriyama asking if he’s satisfied, and Neil saying yes.

Ichirou smiles, and Neil swears for a moment he can see the fading reflection of the shattered gold remnants of his brother’s daemon in his cold eyes, falling over his raven’s feathers. “Whatever name they give you, you still have Wesninski blood in your veins.”

 

* * *

 

Back down in the locker room, the Foxes are waiting for him. Neil looks from face to face, daemon to daemon, each more exhausted than the last, and wonders at what they’ve managed to do here.

“What are you smiling about?” Nicky asks, which is when Neil realises the expression has been on his face since he left the remnants of the Moriyama family up in the tower.

“Guess he’s happy,” Sin says, bounding from his shoulder onto the floor and barrelling into Piper to turn them into a tangle of limbs.

Her antics and Neil’s smile feed a little energy back into the others, lighting them up. Wymack nods and says, “Let’s get out of here. I hear there’s a party waiting on us back at the hotel, so anyone who isn’t on the bus in five stays here and misses out.”

There’s no chance of that happening, but the Foxes get moving like it might. Apparently the promise of seeing their loved ones as well as drinking alcohol lights a fire under them. Andrew and Amaranth are the slowest, and Neil and Sin stick around to wait.

Andrew stops in front of them holding both of their bags, and doesn’t protest when Neil takes them both and sets them off to the side. He says, “Your dramas are getting old.”

“I thought you liked me keeping your life interesting.”

“I thought you had a sense of self-preservation.”

“No you didn’t,” Neil asserts. Andrew doesn’t disagree with him.

Neil feels a tug, and they both look down, just barely missing knocking their foreheads together. Between them, Sin has put her paws up on Andrew’s legs, and meets his eyes when he glances to her.

“Pick me up,” she tells him.

“You don’t have to do that,” Neil says to Andrew, and debates stepping on her tail.

“Fair’s fair,” Sin retaliates. Neil is stopped from telling her that life isn’t fair by Amaranth pushing her head up under his hand, washing the words out of him.

They make their own choices. As does Andrew, which he makes clear by dropping to one knee, effectively dumping Sin off of him, and then running a hand over her from head to tail.

The contact closes the circle, turns the four of them into an ouroboros of energy. Suddenly, Neil feels the most awake he ever has in his life. It’s like someone reached right into his chest and applied electricity directly to his heart. Actually, it’s like Andrew was the one to do it.

He understands now why Andrew spilled coffee. The intent behind the touch makes the difference – this is nothing like Sin’s brushes against Andrew, and then it’s been magnified again by his hand on Amaranth. It’s not until Andrew lifts his fingers off of Sin that Neil can breathe again, shaken to the core. He doesn’t think he’s imagining the quick indrawn breath he hears from Andrew, either.

Andrew stands again, and Neil removes his hand from Amaranth’s head to pull him in. He says against Andrew’s mouth, “It’s not a lack of self-preservation, remember? It’s risk and reward.”

Andrew was the one who said that. He’s also the one who doesn’t dispute it now. He kisses Neil into silence instead.

That’s fine. After this, they’ll go celebrate with their teammates. Neil’s family, the one he bled for and who have fought for him, too. Someone will probably get drunk enough to bring up Neil touching Amaranth before, and Sin will probably climb into Andrew’s lap to make a point. Andrew won’t say anything at all, but he’ll kiss Neil again later when they go out for a smoke break.

In the back of Neil’s head, there’s a whisper of the future – captaincy, and then Court, and everything else not dying young will mean for him. But this is really all that he needs.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> IT'S DONE. Thanks for reading and commenting, I love you all <3


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